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THE WOELD WA 
EOAD TO 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltdu 

TORONTO 



THE WORLD WAR 

AND 

THE ROAD TO PEACE 



BY 

T. B. McLEOD 



WITH AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

By S. PARKES CADMAN 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1918 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and printed. Published, March, 1918 



MAR 20 1918 

©CI.A494168 



TO 

ALL LOVERS OF PEACE 

WHICH IS THE OFFSPRING OF 

RIGHTEOUSNESS AND TRUTH 

AND TWIN SISTER OF 

LIBERTY 

THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE 

OFFERED BY THE 

AUTHOR 



'*And the work of righteousness shall 
be peace, and the effect of righteous- 
ness quietness and assurance forever.^' 



FOEEWOED 

Much that has been spoken and writ- 
ten in these piping times about pacifism 
and the pacifist has fallen short of its 
purpose, and chiefly because the critics 
have allowed their zeal to run into vio- 
lence. 

A people at white heat are apt to have 
scant patience with lack of fervency, 
and to give short shrift to any who may 
hang back. Caution is mistaken for 
hostility, and doubt for treason. We 
are also prone to overlook the psycho- 
logical fact that error is seldom if ever 
cured by cursing it. Wrong opinion 
like clay is stiffened rather than sof- 
tened by fire. Men are not convinced 
with a cudgel, or brought to terms by 
recrimination. Opposition may for a 



FOREWORD 

time be subdued, but it is not perma- 
nently conquered by sheer force. Ke- 
proval and rebuke in order to succeed 
must be carried on with all longsuffer- 
ing as well as doctrine. Even those of 
us who count ourselves rooted and 
grounded in the truth do not relish hav- 
ing truth thrust at us on the prongs of 
a pitchfork. 

Then, besides, this damnatory method 
of dealing with the pacifist fails to sat- 
isfy a large number of people who, 
though themselves militaristic for the 
moment, are loath to believe that so 
many men and women of exemplary 
character are pacifistically inclined 
without any rhyme or reason. Their 
reason to be sure may not appear sound 
on examination, but may it not be sin- 
cere ? And if sincere is it not entitled 
to the respect which men usually accord 
sincerity? The American pacifist is 
not necessarily a traitor, neither is he a 



FOEEWOE-D 

fool, and many of us would like to have 
his creed stated fairly and discussed 
dispassionately. 

The writer has endeavoured to put 
himself in the pacifist's place; to catch 
his point of view ; to meet him squarely 
on his own ground and to show that his 
position is not so impregnable as to ren- 
der the reconsideration of it by himself 
a waste of time. 

The writer moreover entertains mod- 
estly the hope that the following pages 
may be of assistance to some who while 
in hearty sympathy with the nation in 
the present crisis may be at a loss on 
the spur of the moment to give a reason 
for the faith that is in them. 

T. B. McLeod. 



i:tTTKODUCTOEY :n^0te 

It is superfluous to introduce Dr. 
McLeod to the religious world. He has 
long been known and recognised on both 
sides of the Atlantic as a thinker and a 
preacher of ability whose usefulness in 
common with that of many another di- 
vine has in my judgment been curtailed 
by his reluctance to give his utterances 
the wider range which the press affords. 
Fortunately I was permitted to read 
the manuscript of this admirable and 
weighty book, The World War and the 
Road to Peace, and presuming upon 
the long and intimate friendship with 
which the author has honored me, I 
urged its publication. After some dis- 
cussion and rather because he deeply 
felt the seriousness of the crisis now 



INTEODUCTOEY NOTE 

upon the Cliristian Church than because 
of my request, he consented to forego the 
habit of a life-time and send out a mes- 
sage which is as earnest and devout as it 
is wise and timely. I shall not be 
guilty of the impertinence of summar- 
izing the argument which the author 
pursues ; nor shall I in any way antici- 
pate the profit to be obtained from the 
author's discussion or the reader's pleas- 
ure in a style which is as lucid as light, 
and possesses a pungency reminiscent 
of Thomas Huxley at his best. The 
theme has already been treated by nu- 
merous writers: by some with clarity 
and conclusiveness: by others in that 
sentimental temper which defeats jus- 
tice in its yearning for a fictitious peace. 
But few I have noted have brought to 
the debate a fuller knowledge of its is- 
sues than Dr. McLeod displays, and 
none have expressed them to better 
effect. The balance and sobriety of a 



INTKODUCTOEY NOTE 

mature mind are apparent on every 
page, and this putting of a vexed case 
cannot fail to be greatly helpful and 
even illuminating to thoughtful preach- 
ers, teachers, lecturers, and laymen gen- 
erally, who have constantly pondered 
the questions at stake and doubtless have 
often felt what Dr. McLeod here says 
and says so well. Perhaps it is need- 
less for me to add that I heartily indorse 
the main positions he takes and so ade- 
quately defends. J^or can I find any 
satisfactory refutation for his apolo- 
getic in behalf of righteousness as the 
source of peace. The dangerous ten- 
dencies which are neither moral nor im- 
moral so much as they are non-moral, 
and which make for peace as though it 
were not a derivative of justice are here 
candidly stated, and the appointed path 
to the concord we all crave clearly indi- 
cated. I am thankful that Dr. McLeod 
has written this book and I believe it 



INTEODTJCTORY NOTE 

will be an instrumentality for great 
good in every circle where it is received. 
It is much in small compass; a com- 
pressed, concentrated, vigorous bro- 
chure, catholic in spirit, unmistakable 
in aim, and having the truest eloquence ; 
the eloquence which belongs solely to an 
unfaltering grasp of fundamental reali- 
ties. 

S. Paekes Cabman. 



CONTENTS 
I 

PAGE 

A Plain Word with the Pacifist 1 

II 

Undebatable Ground . . . .16 

III 

Pacificism in Terms of Eeligion 31 

IV 

Pacificism in Terms of Con- 
science 42 

V 
Pacificism in Terms of Humanity 57 

YI 

Compensations 77 

VII 

The Eeal Eoad to Peace ... 96 



The World War and 
the Road to Peace 

I 

A PLAIN" WORD WITH THE PACIFIST 

IN" these excited times words are apt 
to run high and high words serve no 
good purpose; certainly they do not 
make for peace, whereas plain words if 
spoken in a kindly spirit may hope for 
a tolerant hearing, and if they do not 
leave their auditor in a better mind they 
at least do not leave him with a bitter 
heart. 

And yet it takes courage under some 
circumstajices to speak plain words es- 
pecially when you are to speak them to 
1 



a THE WOELD WAR AND 

your good friends whose flesh is still 
quivering under the stinging lash of 
criticism. Plain words however well 
meant may prove under such circum- 
stances as unacceptable as blisters on 
raw wounds. 

At the roll call of pacifists I hear 
with no little regret responses from 
some whom I am proud to number 
among my personal friends who not only 
deserve but command my confidence and 
admiration — men of unchallenged in- 
tegrity in the commercial world, of rec- 
ognized standing and ability in the lit- 
erary world, holding high places in the 
Public Service, eminent as preachers of 
righteousness and peace in the religious 
world. It is easy to see therefore how 
one possessed of ordinary modesty re- 
coils from the task, though it be self- 
imposed, of having a plain" word with 
men to whom he is accustomed to listen 
with deference, whose advice he covets 



THEi ROAD TO PEACE 3 

on matters of business, whose writings 
enrich his mind, at whose feet he gladly 
sits and waits for instruction in right- 
eousness and guidance in the way of life. 

One does not like to find himself at 
variance with such men, much less to 
assume the role of censor or of counsel- 
lor, though moved by an irresistible im- 
pulse to speak a plain word to them for 
the good of their souls. The writer be- 
sides suffers from an instinctive aver- 
sion to controversy of any sort, whether 
with the sword, or with the pen, or with 
the tongue. Dissension distresses him; 
even discussion gets on his nerves. 
Rather than insist on his point, his im- 
pulse is to agree with his adversary 
quickly. 

There are two possible predicaments 
which confront the man who is 
prompted to speak to the pacifist just 
now, neither of which can well be 
avoided. One of these is the likelihood 



* THE WOELD WAR AKD 

of being numbered with those offensive 
opponents of pacificism who work off 
their opposition in wordj abuse. They 
call hard names ; they pronounce inflam- 
matory judgments ; they rail ; they pre- 
fer charges of disloyalty and treason. 
In portioning out rebuke discrimination 
has been cast to the winds. While it is 
true that all pro-Germans, Sinn-Feiners, 
Bolshevikis, slackers, cowards, traitors 
are pacifists, it is not true that all pacif- 
ists are pro-German. But all pacifists, 
the pro-German and the patriotic alike, 
have been brewed in the same mortar 
with the same grinding pestle of wrath- 
ful accusation. 

Here then is one unpleasant predica- 
ment, namely, that if I venture my plain 
word I shall be turned down at the very 
start as one more of those terrible ogres 
who delight in billingsgate and love to 
fondle every opponent with a club. 

Failing to escape this fate I stand in 



THE BOAD TO PEACE O 

for the other thing that I have dreaded. 
For the pacifist is not as peaceable as 
he looks. When set upon he is a hard 
hitter. He does not sit down and ac- 
quiescently accept as chastisement from 
the hand of the Lord the criticisms of 
men no better than himself. He strikes 
back and fiercely sometimes; and I can 
hardly expect to escape some share of 
the retaliatory shelling meted out in 
full measure to those who in their zeal 
apply to the pacifist such terms as pussy- 
foot, and molly-coddle, and fifty-fifty. 
The recent lurid fulminations against 
his foes by one of our most eminent and 
influential pacifists ought to serve as a 
warning to timid souls who may be 
tempted to take issue with him and his 
brethren. In his sabbath temper, he ex- 
horts us all, when men are saying hot 
and scorching things, to use language 
which is free from heat, and to take 
heed unto our ways that we sin not with 



b THE WOELD WAR Ain> 

our tongue. After reading this ex- 
hortation, one is more than surprised by 
the bituminous rhetoric which this 
peace-loving preacher of righteousness 
employs as a vent for his holy wrath. 
I dread being told as this pacifist has 
told others that my patriotic utterances 
are " bowlings/' that my best meant ef- 
fort to inspire others with my own sen- 
timents of loyalty is only a " feverish 
frenzy/' and that if I attempt to stir up 
the lukewarm I cannot hope to have the 
countenance of the sanest and noblest 
men of the country (meaning pacifists 
of course) . 

Even though my withers are as yet 
unwrung, I can hardly abstain from 
shivering as I read the mordant chas- 
tisement which the press receives at 
this pacifist's hands or rather his mouth. 
" Fortunately/' he says, " E'ew York 
papers are not taken seriously outside 
of the city. They are despised in the 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 7 

West and distrusted in the South. 
They are Prussianized, and what they 
are now teaching is the Gospel of Pots- 
dam. The daily press with a few hon- 
ourable exceptions — presumably the 
Hearst papers and the Stoats Zeitung, 
et al. — is owned by capitalists (let col- 
leges and churches take notice, for they 
are not altogether free from the baneful 
influence of the capitalist), shouts for 
big armies and navies and urges the na- 
tion to war. Editors are dabblers in 
world politics; they sit in their offices, 
affect to speak with the oracular finality 
of Jove, caricature and slander clergy- 
men and others who believe in patience 
and sacrifice, and show by their conduct 
as well as by their words that they have 
been with Jesus." 

Nor is the business man spared. 
" The munition makers, money lenders, 
defence committees bring to bear on 
Congress the utmost amount of pressure 



8 THE WOELD WAR AND 

possible in order to plunge the nation 
into war." 

This is rather hard hitting by the man 
who has just exhorted us to take heed 
unto our ways that we offend not with 
our tongue. Perhaps he makes a nice 
distinction between offences with the 
tongue and offences with the pen. 

I have quoted these from abundant 
sayings of like tenor by this preacher of 
the gospel of peace in order to show that 
unless one is prepared to take his medi- 
cine, or to swallow whole the pacifist 
creed, he might better keep away from 
the front benches and remain mute. 

l^evertheless, now that I have started 
I am resolved to face the music and have 
my say. Indeed my courage revives as 
I think of the large number of honest, 
open-minded pacifists who neither bark 
nor bite, and who are seriously opposed 
to militancy by word as well as by 
sword. They see and understand that 



THE: ROAD TO PEACE 9 

the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity, 
and is set on fire of hell ; that words can 
do as much harm as bullets; are as a 
matter of fact more dangerous, for the 
worst thing a bullet can do is to kill the 
body, whereas a word can kill the soul. 
To shed the blood of an enemy in fair 
fight is a venial sin compared with the 
assassination of character by lying lips. 
Indeed one need not even use the lips in 
a deadly assault on character. A shrug 
of the shoulder or a tilt of the eyebrow 
will do the trick. There is no compari- 
son as to the savagery of spraying one's 
social rivals with labial vitriol and that 
of spraying the enemy on the field with 
shrapnel. Slashing other folks with a 
serpent's tongue is a vile form of fight- 
ing compared with the use of physical 
force. 

I am not saying all this by way of 
justifying militarism so-called. Two 
bad eggs cannot be depended on to make 



10 THE WOELD WAB ATTD 

a good omelet; but I am saying it in 
order to indicate that the pacifist is also 
capable of bad blood, and also to suggest 
that as long as he neglects to remove the 
beam out of his own eye, he would better 
not attempt to remove the mote from the 
militaristic eye. 

My courage to go on with what I have 
to say is further stiffened by the convic- 
tion that as a general rule pacifists like 
other folk are amenable to reason; and 
not only so, but are keen enough to note 
the difference between sound reason and 
sophistry, even when sophistry drapes 
itself in a gown and speaks from a pul- 
pit. No more worthy of confidence is 
it there than if it spoke from an anvil 
and wore a leathern apron. Sophistry- 
is to sound reason what charlatanry is 
to science ; what pedantry is to scholar- 
ship; what quackery is to medicine; 
what daubery is to art. You may re- 
bind and label one of Zola^s novels 



THE BO AD TO PEACE 11 

"moral pMlosophy/' but by doing so 
you will not make it wholesome read- 
ing. 

"A man may cry, Cliurch, Cturch, 
And be no better than other people j 
A daw isn't a religious bird 
Because it keeps a cawing from a steeple." 

Take a sample or two of the sophistry 
to the use of which some pacifists will 
descend for the purpose of supporting 
their doctrine. One of them asks us to 
compare pacifism and militarism, and 
to aid us in the comparison he defines 
pacifism and then he defines militarism. 
How do you suppose he defines the lat- 
ter ? " The militarist," he says, " be- 
lieves in war; believes war is a good 
part of the normal and wholesome life 
of the nation, and that without war 
nations stagnate and the fibre of civi- 
lization rots. The militarist believes 
that war is the mother of virtues and 
that without war at short intervals men 



12 THE WOELD WAE AND 

lose their fighting edge and that virile 
qualities grow feeble and have a tend- 
ency to disappear." 'Now the writer 
of this stuff knew when he wrote it that 
there is not a man or woman on the 
continent of I^orth America who be- 
lieves any such thing of an American 
militarist, not one man or woman. 
There are plenty of people in Germany 
who believe it. In fact this is the Ger- 
man appraisal of war, but this gym- 
nosophist of ours in order to strengthen 
his pacifist creed in the eyes of the 
American people draws a picture, not 
of American militarism but of German 
militarism, hoping I suppose that lit- 
tle children and feeble-minded folk will 
be moved to tears by the contrast. 
This is not sound reasoning; this is 
cheap sophistry. 

Take another specimen of intellec- 
tual legerdemain by this same pacifist. 
After examining it one is left in doubt 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 13 

as to whether his aim is to make out a 
case against the British, or to soften 
our judgment of Germany's guilt, or 
both; but whatever his purpose, the 
baseness of his acrobatic performance is 
apparent to all. " If Germany is 
drowning the women and children of 
England, England is starving the 
women and children of Germany." 
He has nothing to say, you observe, 
about the murder of American women 
and children by Germany. "It is as 
devilish to starve German women and 
children on land, as to drown English 
women and children in the sea." " The 
British blockade is as illegal, indefensi- 
ble, devilish as the German blockade by 
submarines " ; — and now that we have 
placed an embargo on foodstuffs likely 
to reach Germany, our act also is il- 
legal, indefensible and devilish. 

The blockade of the ports of an en- 
emy has the sanction of international 



14 the: WOEIiD WAR ANB 

law, whereas the murder of women and 
children is an atrocity condemned of 
heaven and earth. This author tries to 
make out that the holding up of neutral 
mail and the interruption of merchant 
ships on their way with aid and com- 
fort for the enemy is every bit as il- 
legal, defensible, and devilish as the 
slaughter of innocents on the high seas 
which they have a perfect right to 
travel. Why does he not go on and 
ameliorate Germany's crime in bombing 
undefended towns, hospital ships, and 
hospitals, and murdering little children 
in school and babies in their cradles; 
why does he not? Because this would 
rather hurt his case in the eyes of those 
whom he wants to persuade. This 
pacifist has surely lost his compass, and 
his standard of values has been mislaid. 
Pacifists generally will not hesitate to 
repudiate this sort of work in their be- 
half ; just as they will not hesitate to 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 15 

repudiate all vituperation and the call- 
ing of hard names. The subject which 
is engaging the attention of Americans 
just now is too serious to admit of word 
play and mutual recrimination. 



II 

UNDEBATABLE GEOUND 

AS we approach a free, flexible, and 
friendly discussion of this sub- 
ject, we will be surprised to find at how 
many points we find ourselves in agree- 
ment. 

1. We are all of one mind in our ab- 
horrence of war. We all wish that war 
could never vex the world, just as we 
wish that fire would not burn, or water 
drown, or frost freeze, or sin damn. 
When now and then I am advised by 
my pacifist friends that I would be sur- 
prised to know how many of our people 
detest war, my reply is that I would be 
surprised to hear of a single individual 
among our population of over 100,000,- 
16 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 17 

000, who does not detest war, and that 
if detestation of war makes a pacifist 
then we are all pacifists, and always 
have been and always will be. The 
grim business of war has no attraction 
for any one of us. No American citi- 
zen needs to be preached at or to be bom- 
barded with tracts in order that he may 
become sensitive to the horrors of war. 
He hates war with a perfect hatred, 
and he loves peace so much that he is 
going to have it even if he must fight for 
it. As a people we have many differ- 
ences. We differ widely on questions 
governmental, political, social, educa- 
tional, religious. We are by no means 
of one mind as to the best methods to 
pursue in the development of our na- 
tional life. We are far apart in our 
ideas about labour, capital, taxation, 
the franchise; about internal affairs 
and foreign relation ; but we are all one 
in our abhorrence of bloodshed. The 



18 THE WOELD WAE AND 

tales that come to us of the loss of life, 
the suffering and agony which the 
soldiers and sailors endure are enough 
to curdle the blood in our veins. The 
very thought of it all fills us with a 
strange dismay and dread, and I am 
sure that if there were any way out of 
it, if savage beasts and savage men could 
be tamed and brought to terms by 
magic, or magnetism, or moral suasion, 
there never would be any fighting. 
When it comes to the frightfulness of 
war, the American people know neither 
militarist nor pacifist. Indeed the 
common use of these terms is an abuse 
of language. The American militarist 
is not a man who loves war, but who has 
reluctantly come to see that the brutal 
power organized to destroy the liberties 
and civilization of the world can be met, 
resisted, and overcome only by force of 
arms. The pacifist on the other hand 
is not a coward. He is not a man 



THE EOAB TO PEACE 19 

afraid to fight if need be, but he believes 
that rather than resist by force the des- 
perate demon who has assaulted the 
peace and security of the world we 
might better submit, and suffer, and 
waive our rights until such time as the 
demon is brought to his senses by pacific 
means. 

2. Another point about which there 
can be no dispute concerns the origin 
and authorship of this war. E'obody 
doubts which of the nations is to blame 
for the precipitation of the dire conflict 
which has involved the whole world in 
such misery. 

England with her contemptible little 
army of 150,000 men was in no con- 
dition to go out against the trained and 
disciplined millions of the Central Pow- 
ers. It is matter of record that Great 
Britain, France, and Russia exhausted 
every resource of diplomacy in their de- 
sire to avoid war. They went on their 



20 THE WOELD WAR AND 

knees almost before the Kaiser in their 
entreaties that he would spare the world 
the catastrophe into which he and his 
Potsdam gang had chosen to plunge it. 
Serbia surely did not want to fight. 
Rather than get into trouble she offered 
to yield everything short of her sov- 
ereign rights as a nation. Poor little 
Belgium — tortured and crucified by 
that moral monster who has been out- 
lawed by the civilized nations — did not 
want to fight. She drew the sword only 
when her territory was actually invaded 
by the Hun in defiance of his solemn 
oath to respect and protect Belgium's 
neutrality. Italy did not want to fight ; 
and for a year and a half after war 
broke out maintained a strict neutrality. 
And surely responsibility for this war 
cannot be laid at our door. The United 
States did not want to fight. For two 
and a half years, in spite of numerous 
provocations which no other great self- 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 21 

respecting nation would have put up 
with we succeeded in keeping out of 
war. For two and a half years the 
insolent, arrogant German ogre kept 
thrusting his leering lineaments into 
our face, but provoked nothing from us 
in response save an occasional mild pro- 
test. In the opinion of some of us we 
kept out of the fight altogether too long ; 
so long in fact that the enemy decided 
we were cowards; our friends judged us. 
to be morally indifferent; and we our- 
selves had begun to lose all sense of self- 
respect as a nation. During this 
period of neutrality we endured unpar- 
donable insult and outrage with unpar- 
donable patience and long suffering. 
Our hospitality was being barefacedly 
abused by the guests of the nation. 
The ambassadors of the Central Powers, 
German military and naval attaches, 
propagandists, agents, spies were plot- 
ting against our peace; were subsidiz- 



22 THE WOBLD WAE AKD 

ing our press ; were corrupting our leg- 
islators ; were dynamiting our factories ; 
were sowing the seeds of dissension 
among our people; were seeking to em- 
broil us in war with Mexico and Japan ; 
were unleashing their submarines to 
sink our merchant ships and to murder 
our citizens, men, women and children. 
There is no American fit to be at 
large but knows that we are not respon- 
sible for this war, that we did not pro- 
voke it, unless indeed our refusal to 
become a vassal under German suze- 
rainty is to be regarded as provocation. 
To quote the words of President Wilson, 
" It is plain enough how we were forced 
into the war. The extraordinary in- 
sults and aggressions of the Imperial 
Government of Germany left us no self- 
respecting choice but to take up arms in 
defence of our rights as a free people, 
and of our honour as a sovereign gov- 
ernment. The military masters of G^r- 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 23 

many denied us the right to be neutral. 
They filled our unsuspecting communi- 
ties with vicious spies and conspirators 
and sought to corrupt the opinion of our 
people in their own behalf. They 
sought by violence to destroy our indus- 
tries and arrest our commerce. They 
tried to incite Mexico to take up arms 
against us, and to draw Japan into a 
hostile alliance with her. They impu- 
dently denied us the use of the high seas 
and repeatedly executed their threat 
that they would send to their death any 
of our people who ventured to approach 
the coasts of Europe. What great na- 
tion under such circumstances would 
not have taken up arms ? Much as we 
have desired peace, it was denied us and 
not of our own choice. This flag under 
which we serve would have been dis- 
honoured had we withheld our hand." 

If any pacifist in spite of these facts 
and this declaration still doubts which 



24 THE WORLD WAR ANIO 

nation is to blame for this war, I would 
lead him right up to the inner sanctum 
of pacifist headquarters and have him 
listen to what the High Priest himself 
has to say. " One nation is more re- 
sponsible for this war than any other, 
and on that nation should rest the hot 
indignation of all men who love right- 
eousness. The trampling upon Belgium 
was one of the most infamous and das- 
tardly crimes committed by any nation 
in a thousand years. If that was not 
wrong, then there has never been a 
wrong thing done on our planet." And 
he expresses the hope that the Hohen- 
zoUern dynasty will be overthrown. So 
firmly convinced from the beginning of 
Germany's guilt was this distinguished 
leader in the pacifist school, and so 
strongly did the current of his sympa- 
thies run in the direction of the entente 
allies that he deprecated the President's 



7'HE ROAD TO PEACE 25 

advice to the American people to ob- 
serve a strict neutrality. 

3. One other point at which pacifists 
and non-pacifists can meet without the 
least danger of dispute concerns the pur- 
pose with which we as a nation deter- 
mine to enter this war. It will be uni- 
versally admitted that we have entered 
the war with hands as clean and hearts 
as pure as those of the men who fought 
at Lexington, at Bunker Hill, at Valley 
Forge and at Yorktown. And what is 
true of our purpose is we believe equally 
true of the purpose of our allies. It is 
quite a common way of ours — quite 
cheap also and not at all satisfactory 
in its result — when we wish to convict 
a man or a nation of present guilt to 
rake up the past and think of all the 
evils that were done in those degenerate 
days. It is admitted that many selfish, 
aggressive, unrighteous wars have in the 



2Q THE WORLD WAE AND 

past been wa^ed by European nations, 
but it is not a respectable metbod of rea- 
soning to take me back to wars waged 
long ago in India, Africa, Cbina, Spain, 
Ireland, in order to convince me tbat 
England and France must be criminally 
engaged in tbis war. Sucb a style of 
reasoning as tbis is on about tbe same 
moral plane as petty larceny. 

'Not one of tbe entente belligerents is 
figbting for Empire, for territorial ex- 
pansion, for commercial supremacy, for 
tbe suppression of a successful competi- 
tor, or for any selfisb end wbatsoever. 
Tbese nations are figbting, as we are 
figbting, to make tbe world a safe place 
for free men to live in. We are figbt- 
ing in order to prevent a cruel, brutal 
autocracy from overriding weak and 
defenceless peoples. We are figbting 
to secure for small nations tbe rigbt to 
live tbeir own lives free from outside 
interference, to enjoy political auton- 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 27 

omy, and to develop their own ideals. 
We have taken up the bloody pen to 
write that never again on this planet 
shall a brutal military power attempt to 
establish the rule of might over right, 
to set up a new moral code for the world, 
and to dominate the thought and will of 
other peoples; and while we are about 
it to write it so indelibly that no reflu- 
ent wave of barbarism can ever wash it 
out. 

" The object of this war," says Presi- 
dent Wilson, " is to deliver the free peo- 
ples of the world from the menace and 
the actual power of a vast military estab- 
lishment controlled by an irresponsible 
government which, having secretly 
planned to dominate the world, pro- 
ceeded to carry this plan out without 
regard either to the sacred obligations of 
treaty or the long established practices 
and long cherished principles of inter- 
national action and honour." 



28 THE WORLD WAR AND 

Here then are three important points 
about which we are all of one mind: 

(1) We all hate war. We are a peace- 
able and peace loving people. We are 
so bj a temperament and by education. 

(2) We are all agreed as to where the 
blame for this war lies. We did not 
provoke it, we were provoked into it, 
as the President says, " we were denied 
any other choice." (3) We are agreed 
that in taking up the sword, we are not 
actuated by revenge, or by greed, or by 
lust of conquest, or by any sinister mo- 
tive whatsoever, but only by the high 
and fine resolve to help redeem this 
world from slavery to an immoral mon- 
ster, and to establish more firmly in the 
earth the reign of righteousness and 
truth. 

But, alas, while accepting without re- 
serve the facts and principles stated 
above, we are not all of one mind as to 
the method to be employed for the 



THE; BOAD TO PEACE 29 

emancipation of enslaved peoples and 
for the putting down of that arrogant 
power which dares to impose its will on 
the civilized world. The majority of 
us believe that the savage enemy who 
flouts all moral obligation can be mas- 
tered by force only; that moral suasion 
would be worse than wasted on the ram- 
pant wild beast; and ghastly though it 
be to even contemplate there is nothing 
for it but to meet and down the demon 
power with its own weapon. 

On the other hand a respectable mi- 
nority of the people calling themselves 
pacifists insist on some other way for the 
settlement of controversies than the way 
of physical force and therefore they are 
opposed to armies and navies and guns 
and forts and everything suggestive of 
war. 

The grounds on which their oppo- 
sition rests are various and of various 
value. Indeed, to the average intelli- 



30 THE EOAD TO PEACE 

gence many of them are of no value as 
foundations. Some are as unsubstan- 
tial as a dream, or as a mirage of the 
desert which disappears as it is ap- 
proached. Some are as undependable 
as quick-sand, and some are so fluffy and 
flimsy that they shrivel up like gossa- 
mer in the judgment fires of criticism. 
On such grounds as these is based the 
opposition of all sorts of queer people, 
visionary people, flighty people with 
ephemeral interests who are ever ready 
to be seized with any sort of novel no- 
tion provided it be vague enough and to 
organize themselves around it until the 
novelty of it wears off, or until sup- 
planted by some other notion still more 
vague and unpracticable. Such people 
are hopelessly unamenable to plain 
words ; so I pass on to examine some of 
the more substantial grounds on which 
opposition to war is based by more sensi- 
ble pacifists. 



Ill 

PACIFISM IIS" TEEMS OF KELIGION 

THERE is the ground of religious 
belief. Many pacifists are the 
enemies of war because they believe that 
Jesus was the enemy of war. If this 
be true that Jesus was the enemy of war 
of every kind then none but Jews, athe- 
ists, agnostics and secularists, would be 
in this war or ought to be in this war; 
for the bulk of the American people ac- 
cept the teachings of Jesus as of ulti- 
mate authority. We must not allow to 
go unchallenged the implied claim of 
the pacifists that they are the only peo- 
ple who recognize and yield obedience to 
the authority of Jesus. 

But is it true that Jesus declared him- 
31 



32 THE WORLD WAR AKD 

self in opposition to war and forbade his 
followers to fight? We know he for- 
bade revenge, vindictiveness, bitterness, 
hatred, retaliation, reprisal. Even if 
he had never uttered a word in condem- 
nation of these we wonld know that he 
was dead against them. We would 
know it from his own behaviour; from 
the example he set the world of gentle- 
ness, meekness, generosity, charity, and 
compassion. 

But was he against war of every sort 
regardless of the purpose with which 
men and nations fight ? If we take him 
literally and not as the oriental mind 
took him — and we must remember that 
Jesus had to do with the oriental mind, 
which was fed on imagery — then we 
must admit that he was dead against 
war. 

" Resist not evil. If a man smite thee on the 
one cheek turn to him the other also. If a man 
compel thee to go with him a mile, go with 
him twain. Love your enemy, etc." 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 33 

These and other like sayings of his 
do sound as if he did not intend his fol- 
lowers to fight for any cause whatsoever. 
If I am to take them literally and obey 
them implicitly, then no rights of mine 
are so sacred as to justify my vindica- 
tion of them by force; and no wrongs 
of which I may become the victim can 
be so outrageous as to justify my resist- 
ance of them. The burglar may have 
my property ; the human swine may in- 
vade and despoil my home, mistreat my 
wife, and murder my children with im- 
punity. 

But while distraught and well-nigh 
exhausted by my effort to adjust my 
thinking so as to harmonize with these 
sayings of Jesus, I suddenly come 
upon other sayings of his for an 
interpretation of which I must appeal 
to the pacifist. That saying of his 
for instance about hating my father, 
mother, wife and children as a para- 



34 THE WORLD WAR AND 

mount condition of disciplesihip ; and 
that other saying of his, " I came not to 
send peace on earth, but a sword; 
to set a man at variance against his 
father and the daughter against her 
mother, and the daughter-in-law against 
her mother-in-law," and that saying of 
his, " He that hath no sword let him sell 
his garment and buy one." Am I to 
take these sayings of Jesus literally 
also? The pacifist cannot have it both 
ways. If the words of Jesus which 
seem to be opposed to war are to be 
taken literally, by what canon of inter- 
pretation am I required to take figura- 
tively these other sayings of his which 
seem to imply that under certain cir- 
cumstances he approves of war. 

As a matter of fact any effort of ours 
to arrive at an understanding of these 
and other similar sayings of the Mas- 
ter must lead to endless confusion un- 
less we study them first in the light of 



THE BOAD TO PEACE 35 

the circumstances under which they 
were spoken, and secondly in the light of 
the nature of him who spoke them. 

The old Jewish custom of revenge 
and retaliation was under discussion; 
and Jesus was condemning that custom 
according to which the Jew had a right 
to demand an eye for an eye, and a 
tooth for a tooth. A cruel custom this, 
exclaims Jesus. Eather than insist on 
the practice of it, it would be a better, 
finer, nobler thing to suffer any indig- 
nity even to the turning of the other 
cheek to the smiter. 

It relieves me to think that it was in 
the spirit of this counsel that President 
Wilson said on one occasion, " We as a 
nation are too proud to fight " — that is 
to say too proud to stoop to vindictive re- 
prisals — too proud to repay outrage 
with outrage. 

Then again before we decide as to the 
value of these sayings of Jesus, we 



db THE WORU> WAR Aim 

should study them in the light of the 
mind and spirit that were in him. He, 
the chivalrous champion of the wronged 
and the oppressed, was often moved to 
anger. His pulses quickened and his 
face grew white as he looked on cruelty 
and injustice. While he never resorted 
to the use of carnal weapons — unless 
we make an exception of that whip of 
small cords — he fought back neverthe- 
less with terrific fierceness. The thun- 
derbolts which the old law hurled 
against wrong and the wrongdoer were 
as feathers compared with his fulmina- 
tions aimed at sin and the sinner. The 
angry lightnings which played about 
Sinai were concentrated in the Sermon 
on the Mount. The tempests of the di- 
vine wrath as reported in the Old Testa- 
ments were dew falls compared with the 
outpouring of Jesus' soul against in- 
iquity. While recalling how the pro- 
phets portray him as the Lamb of God, 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 37 

let US not forget that they portray him 
also as the Lion of the Tribe of Juda. 
If they saw him coming as a preacher 
of peace, they also saw him as a warrior 
coming up out of Edom with dyed gar- 
ments from Bozrah, sword on thigh and 
travelling in the greatness of his 
strength. 

Jesus urged men to be generous and 
gentle, but he never urged them to' be 
molly-coddles. He forbade vindictive- 
ness, but he never forbade vindicative- 
ness. He required men to be long suf- 
fering under personal grievance, but he 
expected them to defend the weak even 
to the death. He discouraged retalia- 
tion, the taking of an eye for an eye, but 
he never encouraged men to permit with- 
out resistance the invasion of their 
homes, the desecration of their sanctu- 
aries, the ruin of their property, the 
abuse of their wives, and the murder of 
their children. 



38 THE WOELD WAR AIH) 

Those of us who would shift over on 
Jesus the responsibility for our oppo- 
sition to fighting with or for our coun- 
try owe it to ourselves to make sure 
that our conception of his program in 
the interest of mankind coincides with 
the facts. It was, as stated by himself, 
a part of that program to purify and 
improve the moral and spiritual facul- 
ties of men; but it was not any part of 
his program to give them a new set of 
faculties in place of the original ones. 
He did not undertake to deal with men 
as we are sometimes obliged to deal with 
a decrepit and useless clock, namely, to 
substitute an entire new set of works for 
the old ones, leaving only the case intact. 
He came to heal the morally sick, not to 
supply them with a different set of or- 
gans and senses; not to give them an- 
other nature, but to reform their present 
nature. He caused lame men to walk, 
but he did not supply them with a differ- 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 39 

ent kind of legs. He restored the par- 
alytic, not by giving him a new set of 
muscles and nerves, but by reviving the 
power of the old ones. He caused the 
blind to see and the deaf to hear, but he 
did not alter the structure of their eyes 
and their ears. Even so, he found 
men's spiritual vision dinamed, their 
spiritual powers partially paralyzed, 
and he restored their defective vision, 
revitalized the impaired faculties and 
gave them a new aim, a new ambition, 
a new outlook, and new ideals. To 
eliminate all or any of their original en- 
dowments would prove nothing less or 
else than an annihilation of their iden- 
tity and the turning out of other kinds 
of creatures. Instead of doing this, his 
object was to verify, vivify, purify and 
empower the capacities with which men 
come into the world. Among these are 
love, sympathy, compassion, anger, 
moral indignation. To eradicate these 



40 THE WOELD WAR AND 

from the structure of the soul would 
only be to dehumanize men. God 
would not be God without them. Men 
Z- would not be men without them. To 
render men incapable of love, sympathy, 
compassion, would reduce them to the 
level of beasts. To render them in- 
capable of anger and moral indignation 
would reduce them to passionless paste. 
To quench in man the iires of moral in- 
dignation would be in a way as much of 
a disaster as to render him incapable of 
love. This would not be giving him a 
new heart, but afflicting him with fatty 
degeneration of the old heart. Better 
leave him as he is than render him an 
anemic and impotent non-resister of 
wrong. 

If I could be convinced that Jesus 
meant to make of me a non-resister un- 
der all circumstances ; meant to develop 
in me a soft and easy tolerance of wrong 
and the wrongdoer and an aversion to 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 41 

dealing lustily with both; meant me to 
lie down and be trampled on by a ruth- 
less foe; meant me to compromise prin- 
ciple and negotiate peace at any price 
with an enemy rather than fight him, I 
would feel compelled to select from 
among the list of the world's heroic 
worthies another teacher and guide who 
would bid me sacrifice and suffer, fight 
and die in behalf of honour, liberty and 
righteousness. 



IV 

PACIFISM IN TERMS OF CONSCIENCE 

ANOTHER class of pacifists base 
their objection to war on moral 
grounds. They fall back not on the au- 
thority of Jesus but on the authority of 
conscience. They are conscientious ob- 
jectors. They have no desire to search 
the scriptures for ammunition where- 
with to pop militants. They have no 
use for the sentimental stuff that is be- 
ing served up in the name of religion. 
They are too intelligent to think of ex- 
ploiting in support of their position cer- 
tain moral maxims of Jesus couched in 
oriental imagery and used for the pur- 
pose of pointing out to a revengeful 
people a more excellent way of behav- 
iour. They have chosen what they be- 
42 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 43 

lieve to be more solid ground for their 
objection to war. Let us see whether 
this ground they have chosen is rock or 
shifting sand. 

1. The presumption seems to be 
against them, though we are not going 
to be satisfied with presumption. A 
man who persists in setting up the au- 
thority of his individual conscience 
against that of the collective conscience 
on any public question ought to make 
very sure that he is in possession of a 
direct divine revelation. When the 
question is a private and personal one, 
the imperatives of conscience are su- 
preme and must not be meddled with or 
gainsaid by the outsider, however wise 
the outsider may be. But when the in- 
dividual conscience comes into collision 
with the public conscience on questions 
affecting the state, the presumption is 
that the decision of the individual con- 
science is not to be trusted. 



44 THE WOELD WAR AKD 

2. We are compelled to listen to much 
that is being said in these days about 
rights — constitutional rights, moral 
rights, religious rights — supposed to 
be sanctioned and secured to the indi- 
vidual not only by public statute but by 
private conscience. On this double 
ground the soap box orator claims and 
defends his right to preach sedition ; the 
peace at any price man his sentimental 
piffle; the teacher his corruption of the 
minds of the youth of the land; the 
preacher his pathetic appeals to sensi- 
tive children and suffering women; the 
legislator his treasonable appeals to the 
masses; the anarchistic demagogue his 
red shirted damnation of the prosperous 
and his impudent effort to build a devil's 
bridge between the home of him who has 
and the home of him who has not. 

3. 'Now this whole question about 
rights, even when the rights men claim 
sound reasonable enough, is a very com- 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 45 

plex one. It is, however, a well estab- 
lished principle of which the pacifist 
should take notice that when even the 
conscientious rights of the individual 
conflict with the rights of society, the 
rightejof society musi remain paramount 
even though the individual suffer 
martyrdom for conscience' sake. For 
instance, the people in their organized 
capacity resolve to have courts of jus- 
tice, school houses, a system of police, 
public roads, canals, breakwaters, 
bridges, lighthouses, etc. Some of us 
never have need of the courts or the po- 
lice or the canals or the lighthouses 
and we might therefore quite conscien- 
tiously claim as our right exemption 
from taxation for the support of these 
institutions, and call the forcible collec- / 
tion of taxes for this purpose an in- 
fringement of our rights. But such as- 
sertion of our rights would very prop- 
erly be laughed out of court. The bach- 



46 THE. WORLD WAR A.WD 

elor has rights, but nobody will regard 
seriously his right to claim exemption 
from the school tax on the ground that 
he has no children to be benefited by the 
schools. The Quaker has rights, but 
what becomes of his conscientious objec- 
tion to fighting when his country is 
driven to war? The state recognizes 
nothing as the right of the individual 
which interferes with its own suprem- 
acy. To allow an individual citizen to 
count himself absolved from conformity 
to the expressed will of the majority be- 
cause that will comes in collision with 
his scruples is to invite anarchy. When 
the state guarantees to the individual his 
legal rights, his constitutional rights, it 
does not extend that benefit to his whims, 
I his caprices, his prejudices, or even to 
1 his conscientious convictions, or pledge 
■ itself to respect the imagined rights of 
the Jew, the Quaker, the Mormon, the 
anarchist or the pacifist. 



THE EOAI> TO PEACE 47 

4. But the conscientious objector 
raises the point that what is wrong for 
an individual to do can never be right 
for a hundred or a million individuals to 
do. If it is wrong for two men to quar- 
rel and to settle their controversy with 
deadly weapons it can never be right for 
two organizations of men called nations 
to use force in the settlement of their 
controversy. The number of men en- 
gaged in a fight does not justify the 
fighting. This is plausible reasoning. 
Let us see if it has any merit above that 
of plausibility. How about the major 
premise of the syllogism ? Even a very 
young child will see at once that it is a 
baseless assumption. He will see that 
it is not always wrong for a man to fight 
and with deadly weapons at that. He 
will see that it is not pacifism but paltry 
cowardice in a man who does not put 
up a fight when a fellow man attempts to 
take his property or his life. 



48 THE WOEIiB WAR AND 

But granting for the sake of argument 
the assumption that it is wrong for an 
individual to fight, does that fact, allow- 
ing for the moment that it is a fact, 
prove that it is wrong for a community 
or a nation to fight? To allow that is 
to disregard and disown a primary vital 
truth, namely, that moral duties are 
often determined by moral relations. I 
am not insisting, mark you, that all 
moral duties are so determined. 'No re- 
lations or complications or combination 
of circumstances can make murder, or 
theft, or lying other than immoral. 
^Nevertheless it is true as we may see by 
a simple illustration or two that certain 
acts take their moral complexion from 
the character of the relations in which 
the actors stand to one another. 

A little boy is severely and cruelly 
treated by his big brother, who seems to 
take pleasure in torturing those who are 
not big and strong enough to defend 



THE: KOAD TO PEACE 49 

themselves. The little fellow feels 
keenly for a time the wrong that has 
been done him and his heart is full of 
anger and resentment; but by and by 
when the smart of his bruises has 
passed away, he forgets his injuries, for- 
gives his cruel brother and is ready to 
join him in the next game as if nothing 
had happened ; and we applaud the little 
fellow's magnanimity and we say what a 
splendid, generous and noble spirit that 
boy possesses. But the unhappy inci- 
dent comes to the knowledge of the 
father of the boys. What will he do? 
What is his duty in view of what has 
taken place? Shall he ignore the af- 
fair ? Shall he take no notice of the big 
brother's vicious behaviour? Shall he 
treat the boy as if he had committed no 
offence, and condone his cruelty? To 
do so would not only he a crime against 
justice but a crime against the boy 
for whose moral training he as a father 



50 THE WOELD WAR AOT> 

is responsible. If he winks at his son's 
brutality he will have nobody to blame 
but himself if by and by he finds he 
has a Cain on his hands. You see that 
what was noble in the little brother to 
do, would be base in the father to do. 
Moral duties are sometimes determined 
by moral relations. 

A good citizen going about his law- 
ful business is set upon and brutally 
beaten and left for dead by a beastly 
bruiser of a man who knows no law but 
that of force and recognizes no author- 
ity but that of his own will. The in- 
jured man is taken to the hospital and 
recovers. His heart is for a time hot 
with indignation against his assailant, 
but being a kind-hearted, magnanimous, 
charitable man he not only refuses to 
take reprisals but forgives his enemy. 
And we say what a fine generous thing 
to do ! But the assault is witnessed by 
an officer of the law who hales the crim- 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 51 

inal to court for punishment. AVhat 
now will the judge do with the prisoner ? 
Will he get down from the bench, pat 
the savage on the back, poor-poor 
him, and give him money to pay his fare 
home ? That would be to encourage the 
man in his evil courses, to confuse his 
moral consciousness — if he should hap- 
pen to have any moral consciousness 
left — to put bad men on a par with 
good men, and to expose the court and 
the law to contempt. T\niat was noble 
in the injured citizen to do would be 
base in the judge to do. Moral duties 
are determined by moral relations. 
What we might applaud as a shining ex- 
ample of generosity on the part of the 
injured individual we would denoimce 
as an atrocious outrage of justice on the 
part of the judge who is the agent and 
representative of the social organism. 

5. We have too much respect for our 
fellow citizen of the pacifist brand to 



62 THE WOEIJ> WAE AI^D 

suspect that there is even one of their 
number who objects to the agencies and 
implements in the way of courts, juries, 
judges, police, prisons which we employ 
to fight the lawless within our gates. 
This being so, it is hard to understand 
why they should object to our use of all 
the resources at our command to fight 
the lawless who thunder at our gates 
from without. 

6. A brutal and unbarbarous nation 
given over wholly to war — its people 
trained not merely in military camps, 
but in universities, schools, churches, 
homes and nurseries — inspired by the 
lust of conquest, marshalling its forces 
during the lifetime of a generation for 
the subjugation of the civilized world, 
has without provocation assaulted this 
country which has dwelt in peace, cul- 
tivated the arts of peace, and lived on 
terms of good will with all its neigh- 
bours. It has trampled on our flag. 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 53 

betrayed our good faith, broken its 
signed and sealed contracts with us, 
maltreated our citizens, murdered our 
women and children, sunk our merchant 
ships bound on peaceful errands, cor- 
rupted our press, sown sedition among 
our people. What is our duty as a na- 
tion under these circumstances? The 
man who on moral grounds and 
prompted by his conscientious scruples 
counsels us to waive our rights rather 
than to fight; to surrender and submit 
to these unspeakable indignities and ir- 
reparable injuries, yes, and even allow 
this demonic power to overrun our land, 
devastate our fair fields, burn and pil- 
lage our cities and homes and reduce us 
to the condition of prostrate Belgium 
without ever striking a blow in vindica- 
tion of our national honour and in de- 
fence of the oppressed whose cry rises 
up into the ears of the Lord God of 
Sabaoth; this man would better look to 



54 THE WOELD WAE AND 

that conscience of his and see of what 
sort it is. 

7. Conscience, however we may de- 
fine or think of it — an inward moni- 
tor ; the voice of God ; God's vice-gerent 
in the heart of man; the tongue that 
tastes the flavour of an intention — may 
be in one of several states. Meant to be 
an infallible guide in conduct, it is often 
dimmed, blurred, dulled, perverted, 
prostituted by passion, by selfishness, 
by prejudice, by pride, by ambition, by 
ignorance. When therefore a man sets 
the authority of his private conscience 
over against the testimony of the public 
conscience he should make very sure 
that his conscience is in good order. 
The conscience of some of us is in the 
condition of an old sun dial in a neg- 
lected garden. Once trustworthy, it 
is now hurled from its pedestal and lies 
overgrown and smothered by tall rank 
weeds. Conscience may be sensitive or 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 55 

it may be seared as with a hot iron. It 
may be alive or it may be dead. It may 
be independent of the will or it may be 
the creature of the will. It may see 
clearly or be purblind or totally blind. 
It may serve as a guide or it may serve 
as a mask for cowardice. If it be true 
that conscience makes cowards of u& all, 
it is equally true that cowardice makes 
for some of us the only shred of con- 
science we possess. O ! Conscience, 
what crimes are committed in thy name ! 
One man persecutes the Christians, 
hauling them to prison and to judgment 
under the stress of his conscience and 
believing the while he is liquidating a 
heavy debt to God. Another betrays 
his master for thirty pieces of silver 
and then, urged on by his conscience, 
goes out and hangs himself. 

8. Keeping in mind these considera- 
tions and also a couple of facts about our 
entrance into this war, namely, first. 



66 THE KOAD TO PEACE 

that the enemy denied us the privilege 
of keeping out of it, and secondly, hav- 
ing gone into it, we are not in it for re- 
venge, or for a division of the spoils, or 
for any selfish purpose whatsoever, but 
in order that we may help make the 
world a safe place for peaceful peoples 
to live in, I must be allowed to doubt 
the firmness of this foundation on 
which the pacifist rests his objection to 
war. 



PACIFISM IN TEEMS OF HUMANITY 

OF all the reasons, specious and 
otherwise, which have been ad- 
vanced by the non-militant in support 
of his contention, the most plausible and 
by all odds the most powerful is that 
based on humanitarian ground. It is 
an appeal to men's hearts, and while 
hearts are being played upon and 
stirred heads are of little value and 
might as well beat a strategic retreat. 
The argument unseals a mighty flow of 
emotion against which reason can hope 
to make but little headway, while 
the pacifist having launched his bark on 
this current finds the pulling easy. 
1. Knowing it to be easy, others be- 
57 



58 THE WOELD WAE Ain> 

sides the genuine philanthropist get 
aboard. The purely selfish man finds 
it a benefit to himself to join the goodly 
company on the voyage. He cares little 
for men, but he has a profound interest 
in money. The lives of others he holds 
cheap enough, but he has great regard 
for his own precious skin. His horror 
of bloodshed is mild compared with his 
horror of taxes. He is thinking not so 
much of loss of life as of loss of prop- 
erty. His fear of the results of war on 
trade and commerce and incomes is his 
uttermost fear. His voice was never 
heard in opposition to war as long as the 
controversy was confined to European 
peoples, for that meant the sale of rich 
cargoes of cotton and corn and muni- 
tions; meant heavy loans and fat prof- 
its; but as soon as the possibility of 
our joining in the fray loomed on the 
horizon he added his voice to the chorus 
of lamentation over the horrors of war. 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 59 

War involving this nation threatened 
his peace of mind and the comfort of 
his easy chair in the cozy corner, and 
he began to croon out his complaint. 
" Why are the nations fighting ? Why 
do they not compromise here and there, 
and yield a point or two for the sake 
of peace? The Belgians butchered to 
make a German holiday could have 
saved themselves from martyrdom by 
conceding to the Imperial Government 
a right of way through their land. 
France could have escaped the woe 
which has overwhelmed her by re- 
fusing to approve of Russia's quar- 
rel. England could have avoided war 
by accepting Germany's bribe, and 
thus the catastrophe which has over- 
taken the world could have been 
avoided." So speaks this man of peace 
who finds it convenient now to sail un- 
der the flag of humanitarianism. He 
may be dismissed. His voice is that of 



60 THE WORLD WAR Ain> 

the sluggard. His protest is the prat- 
ing of the petty egotist; and the great 
body of the American people may be 
trusted to appraise him and his pacifis- 
tic plea at their proper value. 

2. And in dealing with the humani- 
tarian pacifists it is no more than fair 
to assure them that they are not to be 
held responsible for or to be bulked in 
with a group of persons who from mo- 
tives 'of their own (which if not mili- 
tant are mixed) desire to be identified 
and recognized as humanitarian in their 
aims. They are easily distinguished 
by their foreign dialect (if one may 
speak figuratively). They cannot pro- 
nounce the humanitarian shibboleth. 
They are for the most part women, and 
as a matter of course women are hu- 
mane ; and from humaneness to pacifism 
the road is short and easy. But though 
pacifists they are not so from humani- 
tarian motives particularly. Profess- 



THE ROAB TO PEACE 61 

ing a deep interest in humanity, what 
really absorbs them is a passion to pos- 
sess and wield a power which the cruel 
opposite sex has hitherto denied them, 
and to turn themselves out a product 
worthy of the God that made them. 
Pacifists they are, but their love of 
peace is not so ardent as to cause them 
while in pursuit of their object to re- 
frain from doing things of which gen- 
tlemen would be ashamed — hector- 
ing statesmen, bombarding the White 
House, pestering the President in the 
midst of perplexing and burdensome du- 
ties, committing deeds of violence, and 
acting in other very militaristic ways — 
not so dead in love with peace as to ab- 
stain from distracting the public mind 
from the serious business in hand; not 
so high-minded as to be above the use 
of political machinery and methods the 
very mention of which would bring a 
blush to the cheek of any hardened Tam- 



62 THE WOELD WAR AIS'D 

many sacliein. They must have their 
way even though to gain their ends they 
are ohliged to make use of socialists, an- 
archists, pro-Germans and the mixed 
multitude which hangs on the skirts of 
the host of Israel, eating the children's 
bread while they breathe dissension and 
discontent in the hearts of their bene- 
factors. Theirs not to strive to perpet- 
uate the best city administration we 
have had in fifty years. Theirs not to 
try and purify the franchise and 
quicken the sense of responsibility in 
those who possess the franchise, and if 
need be to take it out of the hands of 
thousands who have it until they have 
learned how to use it, but they have 
been using every art of the politician to 
multiply this dangerous power which is 
as apt to explode when handled by an ig- 
norant woman as by an ignorant man. 

And now that these women posing in 
the garb of humanitarianism have won 



THE BO AD TO PEACE Od 

their victory and gained the vote, some 
of them are proposing to bring their 
newly acquired power into the market 
place and sell it to the highest bidder. 
They will agree to be for their country 
if their country will consent to negotiate 
a peace with them and pay them their 
price for patriotism. While the nation 
is striving and straining every nerve and 
muscle in order to defend them and 
their children from the fate of the Bel- 
gians these women are plotting new de- 
vices whereby they may embarrass the 
Government and force it to become sub- 
servient to their will. Suroly, real 
bona-fide humanitarian pacifists, male 
and female, will know how to rate the 
value of such a contingent ambitious to 
march under their flag. 

3. Having said this much by way of 
separating the chaff from the wheat we 
come to the pure, genuine, humanitar- 
ian pacifist who by the purity of his 



64 THE WOELD WAB AlO) 

purpose connnands our respect though 
we are compelled to take issue with his 
conclusions. A sincere desire for the 
weKare of our fellow-heings and an 
earnest purpose to lighten their burdens 
and save them from suffering can never 
fail to win the admiration of all good 
people. The humanitarian pacifist has 
this advantage to begin with. In seek- 
ing to prevent war and in arguing 
against it he is above suspicion. He 
has no by-ends to serve, no personal am- 
bition to gratify, no grievance to air, 
no grudge to work off. He is not influ- 
enced by the thought of possible gain or 
loss. BQis enthusiasm is not chilled by 
lack of patriotism, nor rendered hys- 
terical by blare of trumpets. ITor is 
this kind of man tempted to take advan- 
tage of a serious crisis in the life of his 
country to push his pet scheme or to 
acquire deferred rights real or imag- 
ined. 



THE! BOAB TO PEACE 



65 



4. This being so we can well afford to 
follow his thought and listen to what he 
has to say. He is not thinking solely 
or even very solemnly of the wastage 
of property, the interruption of com- 
merce, the disturbance of trade and the 
shrinkage of prices caused by war. He 
is thinking of vastly more serious 
things, of the suffering and misery and 
agony and bloodshed and slaughter that 
war involves. He is thinking of count- 
less young lives sacrificed on war's 
altar ; of homes left desolate and hearts 
broken; of wives widowed and children 
orphaned; of hosts of wounded return- 
ing from the battlefield, maimed, blind, 
disabled, wrecked mentally and phys- 
ically. He is thinking of great multi- 
tudes of the bereaved going down sor- 
rowing to their graves. And thinking 
of these things he can paint pictures 
that draw tears from all eyes — pic- 
tures pathetic, tragic, gruesome, 



66 THE WOELD WAR AITD 

ghastly; sucL. pictures as only those 
with hearts of stone can look upon un- 
moved. 

5. A powerful argument this, of the 
humanitarian against war, an argument 
worthy the attention of all serious 
minded people. 'No douht President 
Wilson anticipated the force of it; was 
thinking these same thoughts and see- 
ing these same sad pictures for two 
years and a half, and perhaps the vision 
of them had a great influence in decid- 
ing him to endure for so long the in- 
famous behaviour of the Hun rather 
than lead our nation into war. So fear- 
ful was he of being drawn into it that 
he urged the people to observe a strict 
neutrality not only in action but in 
word and thought. He deemed it wise 
to turn a deaf ear to the call that came 
from many quarters of the land urging 
preparedness, fearing maybe that such 
a course on our part might prove an 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 67 

offence and an aggravation to some one 
of the powers; or perhaps because lie 
was the victim in common with many 
others of the delusion that fitness to take 
one's part makes him a scrapper. At 
any rate he refused for some time to lis- 
ten to the demand. In his detestation 
of war and horror of the havoc it works 
he was for a time inclined to judge the 
nations engaged in it as mad. Moved 
by a humanitarian desire to avert the 
calamitous results of war he suffered 
with patience almost super-human the 
presence among us of the plotter and the 
propagandist. He withheld his hand 
while the enemy's spies and incendiaries 
destroyed our property; while his sub- 
marines sank our ships and drowned our 
fellow-citizens; while his emissaries 
schemed to embroil us in war with our 
neighbour across the border and with 
a friendly power beyond the Pacific. 
6. But there came a day when he saw 



68 THE WOELD WAR AND' 

himself and the nation over which he 
presides confronted by an alternative 
from which there was no escape. The 
great pacifist must choose for himself 
and for the country whether he shall 
surrender or fight; whether the nation 
shall abase itself in terror before the 
lawless bandit or resist him; whether 
the country shall survive as an indepen- 
dent and free nation or become the vas- 
sal and slave of German autocracy; 
whether the nation which the fathers 
founded in faith and for whose liberty 
they proudly fought and gloriously died 
shall be preserved and held intact or 
pawned away by their heirs for an in- 
glorious peace. He saw more than this. 
As time went on and events developed 
his horizon widened as he looked. He 
saw the embattled hosts of a mighty 
monarchy, inspired by an ambition to 
control all the kingdoms of the world, 
march forth to slay democracy wherever 



THEI BOAD TO PEACE by 

found and all free institutions. Not 
only were the honour and interests of 
our own nation threatened but the life 
and honour of all free peoples. They 
must bow down and worship before the 
image of the beast or perish. They 
were to be offered a new moral code, a 
new religion, a new god. The new law 
was to be force, the new religion was 
to be German kultur, the new god was 
to be a deity of German make. As 
events developed the President saw that 
the resolve of the entente powers to take 
up arms was neither f anatioal nor fatu- 
ous, but a holy resolve to resist this de- 
monic assault of the arch enemy of 
honour, righteousness, liberty and civ- 
ilization. What then shall be the Pres- 
ident's choice, the nation's choice — 
fight or surrender ? To fight will mean 
sacrifice, suffering, wastage of property, 
loss of precious human lives ; to submit 
will mean the loss of honour, liberty. 



70 THE WOELD WAR AND 

self-respect and all that free men liold 
dear; will mean slavery, shame, and 
everlasting contempt. The President 
made the choice and the nation from 
ocean to ocean has responded Amen ! 

7. And the pacifist? He too has 
made his choice, a choice determined by 
his sympathies, his love for his fellow 
beings, his tender regard for human life, 
his desire to avert the suffering and mis- 
ery and loss which are the fruit of war ; 
and he asks " Can anything be worse 
than war ? " If he will for only a mo- 
ment cease to discuss the matter in the 
abstract and view it in the light of con- 
crete facts we can simply leave him to 
answer his own question. Is anything 
worse than resisting by force the man 
who feloniously breaks into one's home 
to carry away his property ? Why, cer- 
tainly. Compromise with lawlessness 
is worse, to say nothing of the meanness 
of showing the white feather. It 



THE BOAD TO PEACE 71 

would be nice if the houseliolder could 
hypnotize the intruder, or by use of 
some unusual endowment of spiritual 
power constrain him to turn from his 
wicked ways ; but having no such power 
he must fight him or yield him the right 
of way to plunder his victim's home to 
his heart's content. 

Is anything worse than fighting to the 
death the fiend who invades the sanctity 
of your home? Why, yes; your per- 
mitting him to do so without a blow 
by way of resistance; that is infinitely 
worse. What is worse than fighting? 
Why your cowardly pacific non-inter- 
ference when you see a weak and inno- 
cent man being beaten to a jelly by a 
brutal bully ; that is unspeakably worse. 
What is worse than war? This is 
worse, to look on and see unmoved the 
infamous tyrant pounce on a feeble na- 
tion, loot its treasures, devastate its 
fields, pillage and burn its homes, dese- 



72 THE WOELD WAR A]S"D 

crate its temples, murder its old men 
and little children, and dishonour its 
women. Unless the will of God has 
broken down and all moral sanctions 
have lost their authority nothing could 
be worse than for a strong nation to look 
on in moral indifference and see that 
thing done without striking a blow. 
The pacifist has raised the question ; let 
him answer it. 

8. He is not the only kind of man 
who deplores war and contemplates with 
dread consequences of it. Still it may 
turn out to be true that we are placing 
too high a value on lives. Life is cer- 
tainly worth more than meat, but it is 
not worth more than honour. A man 
may be more precious than gold, but he 
is not more precious than moral princi- 
ple. Better every way that he sacri- 
fice his body than that he sacrifice his 
ideals; better that a man, yes, better 
that a whole nation of men should perish 



THE! EOAD TO PEACE 73 

than that they should negotiate a truce 
with iniquity. This globe is the burial 
place of extinct nations, and the disease 
of which they one and all died was a 
godless compromise with evil. What 
can it profit a nation if it win peace by 
bartering its soul ? We think and talk 
of with pride, and keep green with tears 
of reverence the memory of the heroic 
men who counted not their lives dear 
unto them if they might victoriously 
resist the tyranny of the Kaiser George. 
But one wonders what would have been 
the future of this continent if the col- 
onists had turned pacifist and, moved by 
a humanitarian horror of war had 
yielded their necks to the yoke of the 
oppressor. This at least we are sure 
of that the peace secured at such a 
price would have proved a legacy for 
which their descendants could not have 
been grateful. 

9. They counted not their lives dear 



74 THE WOELD WAE AITD 

unto them. It is just possible that we 
think too much about the worth of life 
and altogether too little of what makes 
life worth living. In these soft aeolian 
times, and in this lotus-eating land 
where it is always afternoon we have 
become hyper-sensitive. Our tender 
flesh shrinks under any roughness and 
the only evils we know or care to avoid 
are discomfort, pain and hard usage; 
and we are apt to forget that the great- 
est things this world owns have been 
purchased at the cost of much suffering 
and blood, and that the lives that have 
blest the world the most have been con- 
secrated by the baptism of sorrow. 
From the schoolhouse of suffering and 
sacrifice have come forth into the world 
the noblest virtues. It took Scotch 
glens to raise covenanters, and the rude 
realities of Swiss mountains to breed 
French patriots in the long ago. 



THB BO AD TO PEACE T5 

It is worth considering while honour- 
ing the lads in the army, and we can- 
not honour them too highly ; and while 
doing all we can for their comfort, and 
we cannot do too much ; we may at the 
same time be wasting much compassion 
on them. Having a due regard to 
moral values we may well believe that 
the youngest of them who dies in the 
trenches with the good cause in his heart 
has lived longer after all, and climbed 
higher, and compassed more spacious 
reaches of spiritual vision, and achieved 
more for humanity than the selfish 
sordid stay-at-home will ever dream of 
though he fill out the natural span of 
human life. He who saves his life, 
loses it, but he who loses his life in the 
service of humanity not only finds it 
and keeps it but ennobles and glori- 
fies it for all time and through etern- 
ity. 



76 THE EOAB TO PEACE 

" To every man upon this earth 
Death eometh, soon or late; 
And how can man die better 
Than facing fearful odds 
For the ashes of his fathers 
And the temples of his gods! " 



VI 

COMPENSATIONS 

WHILE the losses involved in this 
most disastrous of all wars must 
baffle the power of tongue to tell or of 
thought to measure or of the imagina- 
tion to conceive, we must not allow 
ourselves to overlook the profits which 
war brings to a people who engage in 
it from high motive. To engage in 
war for the sake of the profit: that is 
another matter. That is execrable. 
That is exclusively an idea of the Prus- 
sian who has not outgrown the instincts 
of primitive man. The Prussian says 
war is profitable, therefore let us fight. 
We say, no possible profit accruing to 
a nation from war could justify the 
77 



78 THE WOELD WAE AWD 

starting of a fight. The Prussian loves 
war; we hate it. He plans it; we 
avoid it, and only as a last resort do 
we accept a challenge to fight. The 
Prussian thinks of war as a gymnastic. 
We think of it as an affliction. Yet as 
an affliction when borne in the right 
spirit it is sure to work out for a na- 
tion an exceeding weight of glory. We 
have already begun to prove this. 

1. There is the moral glory which 
comes to the nation which wages a right- 
eous war. As nothing but shame, con- 
tempt, and degradation can be the re- 
ward of a people who will go to war 
for revenge, or for the sake of gaining 
a few more square leagues of earth, 
or for commercial expansion; so noth- 
ing but glory and honour await the 
people who are willing to sacrifice and 
suffer and give the lives of their sons 
for the defence of the weak, the redemp- 
tion of the oppressed and the vindica- 



THEI BOAD TO PEACE 79 

tion of righteousness. Had we behaved 
in this crisis as if the conflict was no 
concern of ours, as if it made no differ- 
ence to us which side should win ; which 
principle should prevail — that of force 
or that of freedom — we could not have 
retained our self-respect, nor deserved 
the respect and confidence of any nation. 
We would have richly deserved to have 
our brow branded with the execration 
pronounced on an ancient tribe for its 
lack of fealty. " Curse ye Meroz, said 
the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly 
the inhabitants thereof; because they 
came not up to the help of the Lord, to 
the help of the Lord against the 
mighty." But thank God that though 
we hesitated for a long time, weighing 
the pros and cons — self-interest in 
one's scale and the life of civilization 
in the other — we allowed the latter to 
tip the balance. Our flag still waves un- 
desecrated by foreign hands, and un- 



80 THE WOELD WAR AKD 

siillied by our own. And just as we are 
proud of tlie f atliers who listened not to 
tlie voice of self-love, nor yielded to 
their natural dread of bloodshed, but 
gave themselves and all they had to the 
cause of liberty; so the generations to 
come will be singing our praises because 
our natural love of peace and our 
natural shrinking from son nd 

agony were swallowed up of j 
passion and a holy pu^^pose to s ^lo 
once for all that right-^of way must be 
denied to any arroga^it, truculent, pira- 
tfeal power that '^ef'^s to dominate the 
v\)rld. •' 

•^' 2. Another oi "benefits sec^Jred to 
us by this w^ '^11 sc ch 

dreaded and ; ^*s t" 

aC'^''^' 3 thor' d!^j.±j^.^ -j. v±ix^ na- 

Abib^^^Th^'-- -cal sneer- 'jied at our 
^mU '^P^ ' after ?^ -^ a rope of 

^ ' ' ^ nlenc ; ' '-"^ile o"^ 



THEi EOAB TO PEACE 81 

deed it ever fitted ; nor does tliat of the 
links of a chain, nor even that of the 
strands composing a cable. The union 
has become vital. It is that of the 
various functions in the human body. 
!No one of them can say to any of the 
others, I have no need of thee ; nor can 
any one of them suffer without the 
qth^. -vexing affected. Many members 
i??:i,.>;iy^g^ody. If there has been any 
_ ij/ or rivalries in the past, they 
h^ve disappeared. There is no north, 
no south, no east, ;io west. Ours is no 
longer a mere po 'tigal union, but a 
moral and spiriti ideration. W*. 

were uj-iited by agt int, by the pro 



Vi^; ;/r ( of f 


^ 


'., by certain 


s^ .^cion^ 




ire united by 


a-— ox- 


.. -' ^■' 


•obs in •^'^■Tv 


vein of the 


'^Y- politic, 


^^h ... 


a common '' 


">f count 


0' ion 


}la,tred ^-^ 


a COT 


'or 


Use 




0- 



82 THE WOKIiD "WAR AND 

tion to the defence of liberty and civili- 
zation; and these have made us forget 
almost that there ever was any other 
kind of bond. By and by we may re- 
sume once more our competitions and 
rivalries and again give attention to our 
local interests as if they were the only 
interests, but not until we have com- 
pleted the business on hand which is the 
making of the world fit for the habita- 
tion of free peoples. 

3. We will be grateful also for this 
war in time to come because of its aid 
in obliterating the prevailing social disr 
tinctions among us which are so arti- 
ficial and so irritating. There are dis- 
tinctions among us which are neither ar- 
tificial nor irritating. They are natu- 
ral, real, inevitable, and as such we rec- 
ognize and respect — -the distinctions 
for instance that are conferred by 
unusual character, or unusual brain 
power, or by superiority in art, or lit- 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 83 

erature, or statesmanship. We not only 
allow these distinctions, we insist on 
them. But the petty, superficial, man- 
made distinctions, which have split soci- 
ety into classes — distinctions created 
mostly by income, by clothes, by the 
possession of mere things — these are 
being rapidly wiped out by this war. 
The valleys in the social landscape 
which are mere creases after all are be- 
ing exalted, and the mountains and hills 
which are but pimples on a sphere are 
being brought low. Rich and poor are 
meeting together. The lady and her 
maid, the son of the house and the son 
of the cook are seeing eye to eye. Ele- 
ments that for one reason or another 
had fallen apart have come together. 
Animosities have been forgotten. An- 
tagonisms are no longer heard of. We 
have but one faith just now, one hope, 
one aim, one baptism. The stream of 
the nation's life had forked at various 



84 THE WOELD WAE AND 

points in its course, tlie various channels 
in which its divided waters flowed being 
called by different names. But after 
they had taken their own courses for a 
while — some sulking through this or 
that valley, some fretting through this 
or that ravine, some storming around 
the shoulder of this or that obstructing 
height — they have found their way to- 
gether once more, their waters converg- 
ing and mingling in a mighty flood of 
devotion to country and to the rights of 
mankind. 

4. This war has ushered in a new era 
of consecration to service. Multitudes 
of men who have been living selfish 
lives hitherto or, if charitably inclined, 
have been playing at charity as a sort 
of diversion, allowing the poor to pick 
up some of the crumbs from beneath 
their tables, have found themselves and 
opened up. They have unlocked their 
treasure houses and are pouring out the 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 85 

contents of them in streams of benev- 
olence which are making glad the hearts 
of the destitute abroad and the poor at 
home. They are putting into practice 
what has been only a theoretical belief 
hitherto, namely, that life is more than 
meat and the body than raiment; that 
a man's life consists not in the abun- 
dance of the things which he possesses. 
They have come to see that a man's true 
worth is determined, not by what he 
has but by what he is; not by what he 
gets but by what he becomes; not by 
what he accumulates from without but 
by what he develops within; and im- 
pelled by this new vision, they are 
giving not only money, but they are giv- 
ing themselves, their time, their trained 
talents, their experience, their executive 
ability and all their powers of devotion 
to the service of the nation. 'No thought 
now of hoarding for one's self, but of 
spending for the good of others. No 



86 THE WOELD WAR AKD 

more striving and straining to build up 
fortunes on the graves of dead rivals. 
The lust for getting has been supplanted 
by the passion for dispensing. 

This war has also helped many who 
have gone wandering through the world 
half dazed — doped in a way by the 
poor pleasures the world gives — to find 
themselves, and to find a place of rest 
and service. They have been spending 
their days and nights fluttering in the 
light of fashion as moths about a lamp ; 
feeding their stomachs and preening 
their feathers; restlessly loitering 
around ballrooms and card tables and in- 
sufferable afternoon teas; but this war 
has given them something to think about 
and something to do that will keep their 
hearts from turning to stone and their 
brains from turning to pulp. "No finer 
phase of social development has ap- 
peared in half a century than the eman- 
cipation of many of the women of the 



THB EOAD TO PEACE 87 

land from parocliial and petty interests. 
They have moved out into the open 
where deep breathing is possible, and 
the free swing of their powers. Their 
equality with men has been proven in 
these trying days, not indeed by elec- 
tioneering on street corners, or by fol- 
lowing brass bands in procession through 
the streets, or by exploiting feminine 
men and the unwary of every sort who 
could be used in their campaign in be- 
half of what they choose to call their 
sovereign rights, but by their masterful 
seizure and superb use of a great oppor- 
tunity for serving the world at a time 
when hearts and brains are needed as 
they have never been needed before. 
Within the past three years women have 
risen to heights of devotion and achieve- 
ment of which they themselves never 
dreamt themselves to be capable. Many 
of them have gone so far along the hard 
road of service that they can never find 



88 THE WOELD WAE AND 

their way back to the dainty lives they 
used to lead and to the sequestered places 
into which rough experiences never in- 
truded. There has been no call yet for 
our women to undertake men's jobs in 
field and mine and machine shop and 
munition factory^ but they are ready 
for the call when it comes. Meanwhile 
they are organizing their forces and 
have become a mighty power to be re- 
lied on for the winning of the war. 

5. Then closely associated with this 
consecration to service which the war 
has brought us is the call to economy 
which it has sounded. We were a 
spendthrift people. One of our grave 
national vices if not the very gravest 
has been that of extravagance. We 
were certainly going the pace. Indeed 
we had covered a good bit of the well 
worn road that leads from prosperity to 
luxury and from luxury to effeminacy 
and from effeminacy to death. Though 



THE KOAD TO PEACE 89 

we knew it not, we were slowly near- 
ing the fate tliat befell another 
commonwealth long ago which perished 
because when the people had eaten 
and were full, built goodly houses 
and dwelt in them, and their herds and 
their flocks multiplied, and their silver 
and their gold multiplied, and all that 
they had multiplied, they forgot the 
Lord their God and said that their own 
power and the might of their own hand, 
had gotten them their wealth. Well 
may we as a people be grateful for any 
discipline however severe, even for the 
discipline of war, if it save us from the 
prosperity which leads to the wealth 
which leads to the pride which leads to 
the godlessness which leads to national 
degradation and death. And this war, 
cruel though it be, coming just at the 
time it did has saved us by compelling 
us to retrench our expenditures, to cur- 
tail our luxuries, and to live more 



90 THE WOELD WAE AND 

simply. Already we see througliout the 
land liow self-denial has taken the place 
of self-indulgence. Instead of being 
something to be ashamed of, thrift has 
become the fashion. The hall mark of 
superiority is not the amount spent but 
the amount saved; not the number of 
things we can purchase, but the number 
of things we are learning to do without. 
A new commandment has been given to 
us requiring economy, and we are writ- 
ing it on the lintels and doorposts of 
our houses and on our gates — a com- 
mandment the keeping of which will 
not only enable the people to contribute 
more amply to the resources of the Gov- 
ernment, but will encourage our return 
to a simpler and saner philosophy of 
living, which in turn will prove a gain 
of incalculable value in the virility of 
our national character. 

6. This war has opened the eyes of 
our people to a fresh revelation of moral 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 91 

values. I believe it will be freely 
acknowledged by all that tbe power in 
us which recognizes and responds to 
moral imperatives has been greatly in 
need of repair. In fact the old stan- 
dards of moral values had been con- 
signed by many of us to the scrap heap 
with other antiquated and outworn 
things. Other standards had lost their 
value and had become obsolete, why not 
this one? As a consequence of our 
modem methods and machineries, our 
inventions and improvements, old things 
have passed away and most things have 
become new. We have now new ways 
of doing almost everything: of tunnel- 
ing mountains, navigating the seas, and 
communicating with those at a distance. 
We have uncovered the secrets of the 
waters, the secrets of the rocks, the 
secrets of the stars. The school-boy of 
today knows more than Sir Isaac lN"ew- 
ton ever thought of; is familiar with 



92 THE WORLD WAE AKD 

facts of nature which, would have 
astounded that prince of philosophers. 
We have invented ways of economizing 
time, and space, and labour, and cost. 
We no longer consult, we command the 
winds and the waves. We harness the 
forces of nature and compel them to do 
our bidding, we flash our thought or 
resolution from city to city and from 
continent to continent with the rapidity 
of lightning and with the accuracy of a 
mental faculty. 

IRow all these changes and these dis- 
placements of the old by the new have 
made many of us sceptical of the value 
of any old thing. The ways our father 
trod are overgrown and almost indis- 
tinguishable, and so we are tempted to 
think that the principles by which they 
lived are out of date also. We have a 
new astronomy^ a new chemistry, a new 
physics ; why not a new ethics ? 

I wonder if we have not here a part 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 93 

explanation at least of our loose hold of 
moral obligations and our slack applica- 
tion of them. But whether or not, it is 
true that our sense of moral values has 
lost its fine edge. We too as well as the 
German people were coming to think too 
much of natural law and too little of 
moral law, too much of the material and 
too little of the spiritual. We were 
paying so much attention to the sciences 
pure and applied, to chemistry, phys- 
ics, and physiology that we had little 
time to give to the ten commandments, 
the sermon on the mount, the Lord's 
prayer and the Golden Kule. We too 
were beginning to prize efficiency above 
fidelity ; to be more concerned with ends 
than scrupulous as to the means of at- 
taining them, and to place brilliant 
achievement above invincible obedience 
to the will of God. 

This being so, then even war is not 
too costly, if in lieu of gentler methods 



94 THE WOEI.D WAR AITO 

whicli have failed, it stir our dormant 
moral consciousness into proper recog- 
nition of moral values. In spite of all 
its horrors it will have proved a blessing 
in disguise. 

All that has happened before our eyes 
the past three years and a haK, the 
faithless violations of treaties, the im- 
pudent repudiation of international 
agreements, the disregard of all law 
human and divine, the disregard of the 
piteous appeals of suffering peoples for 
mercy, the ferocities, cruelties, inhuman 
barbarities committed by a nation pro- 
fessing to be civilized, has stirred us 
as nothing else could stir us to a review 
and if need be to a revision of our easy 
moral code ; has stirred into activity our 
power of moral indignation which had 
become flabby, has put an edge on our 
blunted regard for righteous dealing, 
and has given us a fresh vision of the 
pricelessness of honour and truth. 



the: road to peace 95 

" Blow, bugles, blow ! they brought us for our 

dearth 
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain. 
Honour has come back as a King to earth 
And paid his subject with a royal wage. 
And nobleness walks in our ways again 
And we have come into our heritage." 



VII 

THE EEAL ROAD TO PEACE 

SOOE'EE or later this war will come 
to an end. We believe it will end 
right. There will be no let-up on the 
part of the allies until the Teutonic 
powers are beaten down, brought to 
terms, and compelled to atone (as far as 
atonement is possible) for their barbaric 
crimes against the world. Then and not 
till then there will be peace; that 
is to say, there will be a cessation of 
hostilities. Fighting will cease. There 
will be an-^nd to bloodshed and slaugh- 
ter. The various contending armies 
will be demobilized. The forces in the 
field will be returned to their homes and 
vsdll resume once again their places in 
96 



THE E.OAI> TO PEACE 97 

the various departments of peaceful in- 
dustry. There will also be in due time 
a resumption of commercial relations 
and later on, when the bitterness pro- 
duced by the war has passed, there will 
be a renewal of social relations between 
the peoples who have been shedding each 
other's blood. 

1. We all want it. It is the thing 
we talk about and pray for ; and nobody 
wishes more or prays harder for it than 
the men on our fighting ships and in the 
trenches. But ardently as we all desire 
it and devoutly as we pray for it, we 
will not be content with a peace secured 
by surrender or by compromise or by 
negotiations. We may if we will have 
peace tomorrow, that is to say, we 
may if we will have an end of 
hostilities. If we want peace so 
badly as to be willing to pay his price 
for it, the Hun will grant it to us, and 
will undertake on certain conditions to 



98 THE WOELD WAE AND 

leave us undisturbed in the enjoyment 
of it. But we do not allow ourselves to 
talk or think of such a peace. We are 
not ready to barter our birthright for 
a mess of pottage. We will have noth- 
ing short of peace with honour; peace 
based on righteousness and wedded to 
liberty. The Teutonic powers are more 
than ready to make peace, and are quite 
willing to enter into a covenant of peace 
with the nations against which they 
have made war. But of what value 
would their signatures be to any pact? 
By their outrageous disregard of former 
pledges they have forfeited the confi- 
dence of all civilized nations. And to 
trust the word of the military masters 
of Germany until they have repented 
and brought forth fruit meet for repen- 
tance would be as absurdly foolish as 
to build a city in the crater of an in- 
active volcano which for the moment ap- 
pears to be harmless. The resultant 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 99 

peace would at best be only a truce to 
be treacberously ended at the conven- 
ience of a foe who has proved himself 
so utterly faithless to all former treaty 
obligations. 

2. But when the German menace to 
^he independence of the world has been 
Polished, and the German will to dom- 
inate the world has been destroyed, and 
the wrongs which have threatened the 
liberty of the world have been redressed, 
then what? How can all further dan- 
ger of war be averted ? By what means 
can a universal and permanent peace 
based on righteousness be established 
and maintained ? Some of our more in- 
fluential leaders strongly recommend as 
a preventive of war and a promoter of 
peace, a fresh and final definition of 
national frontiers which shall be de- 
fended with bristling guns. In other 
words, each nation must be prepared for 
war in order to make sure of peace. But 



100 THE WOELD WAR AIH) 

there are serious objections to the adop- 
tion of this way to peace. In the first 
place, the enormous cost of the plan 
would doom the peoples to perpetual 
poverty, and besides the peace secured 
by this method would after all be but a 
strained concordat. That is not a very 
high order of peace which reigns be- 
tween men who envy one another and 
are ready to fly at each other's throats, 
being prevented from doing so only by 
the impassable barriers which separate 
them. Burglar alarms and loaded re- 
volvers do afford us a sort of protection 
and peace, but a peace after all which 
we can enjoy only with fear and trem- 
bling — the kind of peace which the 
wives and children of long ago enjoyed 
wihile the men folks kept guard on the 
hills against the inroads of Indian sav- 
ages. 

3. Others propose a way of peace 
by the abolition of all frontiers which 



THBi EOAD TO PEACE 101 

hereafter shall be mere imaginary lines, 
and by the amalgamation of the peoples 
under a uniform system of government. 
Such a proposal is about as fatuous as 
the kind of religious union which some 
good people are hysterically striving to 
bring about. Pan-christian conventions 
are periodically arranged, and are at- 
tended by bishops and clergy and laity 
of the various denominations, who get 
together, fraternize, and have a sweet 
millennial time. They talk and pray 
and resolve in the interests of unity, 
thinking that if only all churches could 
agree to repeat the same creed, and use 
the same prayer book, and appear in the 
same vestments, and adopt the same sac- 
ramental forms, and submit to the same 
discipline and government there would 
be unity and peace. They fail to see 
that even if all this that they aspire 
after should come to pass the resultant 
peace might not after all be much better 



102 THE WOELD WAR A.Tn> 

than that which prevails in the family 
vault. They seem to have forgotten 
that just this very kind of unanimity 
and uniformity obtained in Christen- 
dom some centuries ago, and that this 
was the time when the church was the 
deadest. There was a kind of peace, 
but there was a lamentable absence of 
life, and action, and ambition, and 
achievement. But just as soon as there 
were the stirrings of life in the valley of 
dry bones and men began to think and 
move once more, the uniformity was 
broken up and war ensued. If we can 
imagine that the nations — weary and 
exhausted by war — could be made to 
forget differences and to unite under one 
flag, be it that of universal autocracy, 
or democracy, or socialism, in no time 
at all, unless fused together by some 
mighty irresistible spiritual power, ri- 
valries and contentions would spring up 



THE KOAD TO PEACE 103 

and there would be a renewal of hostil- 
ities. 

4. A more promising program for the 
promotion of peace among the nations 
and one in which many of us have put 
great faith is that of the Peace Soci- 
eties which have been in operation for 
many years. These societies have num- 
bered in their membership many of our 
prominent and gifted men who have 
assembled themselves together at fre- 
quent intervals to talk peace, and to de- 
vise ways and means whereby thfe public 
should be enlightened and brought into 
active sympathy with a movement look- 
ing to the settlement of all disputes — 
national and international — by arbi- 
tration. The movement gained rapid 
headway — one of the outward and vis- 
ible signs of its prosperity and power 
being the erection of a magnificent peace 
temple at The Hague, the gift of a 



104 THE WOELD WAB AND 

wealthy and entbusiastic member of the 
organization. Other societies similar 
in character and purpose to the one 
which has flourished in this country 
were organized in several of the Euro- 
pean states and enlisted the approval 
and support of thoughtful and influen- 
tial people everywhere, who like our- 
selves had an unbounded faith in their 
power to bring about a condition of per- 
manent peace among the nations. Only 
one more thing was needed to complete 
the efiiciency of this movement, and that 
was the binding together of these sep- 
arate and already powerful organiza- 
tions in one international body. But at 
the very moment when this union was 
about to be consummated, in spite of 
all our faith and hopes, the bloodiest 
and most disastrous war ever seen on 
this planet broke out and the various 
Peace Societies which promised such 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 105 

great things were blown to bits by the 
explosion. 

5. And now in place of this a brand 
new society has been organized on an 
entirely different basis, whose object is 
to bring about and maintain permanent 
peace by force. The organization is 
known as " The League for the Enforce- 
ment of Peace." When it gets under 
way there will be no more eruptions. 
Lids are to be fitted and screwed down 
on all craters. The underworld may 
boil but it can have no vent. The 
various nations are to unite in legis- 
lating into existence a police force which 
will do for the world at large what the 
police do for a city by proving them- 
selves a terror to evil doers. The pact 
of peace once signed any nation show- 
ing symptoms of disloyalty is to be 
watched and if guilty of an overt breach 
of the peace is to be indicted, convicted 



106 THE WOELD WAE ATTD 

and punished. Peace by the forcible 
suppression of the peacebreaker is the 
gist of the scheme. 

The experiment may prove well 
worth while. It will be interesting to 
watch how this new legislation will 
work. Its operation will certainly have 
the spice of variety, the culprit of today 
being one of the jury tomorrow. The 
plan may secure us a kind of peace, but 
not quite the peace we need and most de- 
sire. The mother may enjoy the quiet 
but hardly the peace which reigns in the 
house while Young Irrepressible is do- 
ing time in the closet. But we may 
surely aspire to a higher kind of peace 
and follow a better road to it than that 
afforded by legislation, national or in- 
ternational. Law at its best can only 
muzzle the vicious dog; it cannot cure 
his viciousness. It may restrain the 
horse's heels with kicking straps but it 
cannot cure his evil temper. It may 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 107 

clip the tiger's claws but it carmot 
change the tiger's nature. Law may be 
able to clear a devil out of the house, and 
sweep and garnish it, but it cannot pre- 
vent seven or more other devils from 
entering in. Regulations and restraints 
imposed by law are a social necessity 
under existing conditions, but the most 
and the best they can accomplish in the 
direction of peace is to carry on an in- 
exorable and unending war against the 
law-breaker. Before the world can 
have the peace it needs and longs for 
the fires of evil passion must be subdued, 
and the will to do wrong broken down. 
But to try to compass these ends by 
legislation would be as foolish and futile 
as to try to extinguish Vesuvius with a 
garden hose or to demolish Gibraltar 
with a pop-gun. 

6. Seeing the hopelessness of secur- 
ing a righteous and permanent peace by 
either of these methods, many of us are 



108 THE WOELD "WAR AND 

putting our faith in education as a pan- 
acea for the world's ills. Men are 
quarrelsome and blood-thirsty because 
they are ignorant. Educate and en- 
lighten them and they will not only be- 
come peaceable, but peace makers. But 
highly as we prize the benefits of educa- 
tion and knowledge, the theory that they 
are not merely a specific but a cure-all 
and an effective preventer of war is dis- 
credited by the fact that the best edu- 
cated nation on the earth today is the 
most warlike, and not only so but the 
most cruel in its practice of the art of 
war. 

Knowledge after all is but a weapon ; 
a weapon that may be wielded by a bad 
man or a good man for purposes of de- 
struction or for purposes of construc- 
tion. The educated man is armed, but 
if knowledge is all that his education 
has given him, he is not full armed for 
the highest achievements of life. When 



THEI BOAI> TO PEACE 109 

a boy has completed his. schooling you 
are not dead sure whether he will put 
the schooling to good or bad uses; 
whether you have prepared him to make 
an honourable livelihood and to be a 
blessing to the community, or to write 
iniquity and read putrescence and to 
figure up the difference between his 
small income and the enormous one of 
the man next door. The doctor's knowl- 
edge of physiology, of hygiene and 
drugs does not keep him from abusing 
his body, l^or does the lawyer's knowl- 
edge of law preyent him from becoming 
a law breaker. A man's education may 
multiply his power for peace if he be a 
man of peace, or it may multiply his 
power to kill his fellowmen if he be a 
man of war. Education has not made 
Potsdam pacific, because to the mind 
of a G-erman knowledge and morality 
are as mutually exclusive as frost and 
fire. Germany — the schoolroom of 



110 THE WOELD WAB ANI> 

the world — has subsidized the school- 
room, the university, the professor, the 
doctor of divinity, the student in the 
interests of war. Education of itself 
does not make men less proud, less 
haughty, less arrogant, less intolerant of 
their fellows. At best it but drapes 
with a thin disguise his natural sav- 
agery, while it enables him to convert 
the arts of peace into the most deadly 
devices for destruction. 

Education, legislation, arbitration, 
leagues for the enforcement of peace — 
all good as far as they go — are inade- 
quate to the end they aim at because 
they all work on the outside. They 
deal with symptoms and not with the 
disease. They fail and must fail of a 
cure because they attempt to treat the 
patient for some cutaneous affliction 
when the real trouble of the sufferer is 
disease of the heart. 

7. What the world needs for the pro- 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 111 

motion of peace is power to change men. 
Wlien that power is brought to bear on 
society we shall have peace, permanent 
peace. Change men and their laws will 
be changed. Make men just and their 
laws will be just. Make men kindly 
and the social order will be kindly. Let 
this new power infiltrate the people, and 
then war will not only be averted but 
war will be impossible. There will be 
differences of opinion still, diversities 
of gifts, differences of organization and 
of administration, but there will be 
peace, just as peace reigns between the 
diverse organ and functions of the hu- 
man body. 

What is this power which promises 
to pacify the world and put an end to 
strife? It is the power of the Gospel 
of Jesus Christ. !N^ineteen centuries 
ago He the Prince of Peace came an- 
nouncing his program to the world. 
Eighteousness was the girdle of his 



112 THE WOELD WAR Ain> 

loins and faithfulness the girdle of his 
reins. He did not call out his program 
on the highways or introduce it with 
noisy demonstration. J^either beating 
of drums nor blare of trumpets an- 
nounced his appearance. His doctrine 
dropped as the rain and his speech dis- 
tilled as the dew. He did not cry or 
lift up or cause his voice to be heard in 
the streets. His expectation of the ul- 
timate success of his program though 
confident was modest. While taking 
for granted that it would win ascend- 
ancy in the long run, he foresaw that 
its progress would be slow ; but he could 
bide his time. One day with him was 
as a thousand years and a thousand 
years as one day. A few faithful fol- 
lowers were all he could boast of at the 
close of his earthly career, but these 
few were men of faith who won other 
converts, and these in their turn still 
others until as the years and the cen- 



THEi EOAD TO PEACE 113 

tiiries came and went, tlie disciples of 
Jesus were numbered by millions — 
visionary men and women if you please, 
idealists, dreamers of dreams — who, no 
longer deceived by the gospel of force, 
the gospel of hate, the gospel of selfish- 
ness, the proud gospel of human effi- 
ciency, were committed to that Kingdom 
into which the glory of the nation would 
yet be brought. They foresaw that all 
kings should yet bow the knee before 
this Prince of Peace, and that on his 
head would be many crowns — the 
crown of politics, of commerce, of sci- 
ence, of art, of literature, and that under 
his gentle but omnipotent sway war 
would cease unto the ends of the earth, 
and that the matin of the angels heard 
over the fields of Bethlehem would in 
the fulness of time be chanted around 
the world. 

But many of the adherents of Jesus 
in these days have grown sceptical con- 



114 THE WOELD WAR AND 

cerning the efficiency of his scheme for 
the woes of mankind. They have stud- 
ied it with interest, have been attracted 
by it, have admired it, but they have 
come to lose faith in it as a practical 
solution of the hard, unrelenting and 
inveterately hostile conditions that curse 
humanity. Christianity has been on 
trial for nineteen centuries and seems 
to have failed as a promised panacea 
against the evil forces which continue 
to disturb the peace of the nations. 

And others of us find our faith 
strained almost to the breaking point 
by the delayed success of Jesus' pro- 
gram. Like a weary bird flying into an 
icy air our faith grows afraid and 
faint, and we are tempted to ask where 
is the promise of the coming of the 
kingdom of peace ? 

'Now it will help to revive and rein- 
vigorate our faith if, curbing our im- 
patience, we ponder seriously and fre- 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 115 

quently two or three plain but important 
facts : 

In tlie first place, the fact that Jesus 
nowhere holds out the hope that the 
progress of His Kingdom in the world 
would be rapid. He Himself had no 
such expectation. On the other hand 
he understood and gave his disciples to 
understand that the growth of his 
Kingdom would be slow; that it would 
come without observation — first the 
blade, then the ear, then the full corn 
in the ear. Unlike mechanical, spir- 
itual forces work slowly. We can erect 
in a few months structures ample 
enough to house thousands of men and 
thus provide for their physical com- 
fort, but it is a different matter when we 
come to make saints of thousands of sin- 
ners. Given forces enough, a great mili- 
tary genius like Napoleon can plough 
Europe with cannon shot and in a short 
time conquer a continent, but to win 



116 THE WOEIiD WAK AND 

the affection and devotion of a dis- 
obedient and rebellious people, that 
is beyond bim. Comparing spiritual 
things with natural we see how the 
higher and more complex the result, 
the longer the time consumed in its 
development. It takes months for the 
seed cast into the furrow to become a 
harvest of golden grain; and years for 
the little babe to become a stalwart man ; 
and centuries for the hollow log to grow 
into the ocean greyhound, or for a 
country sparsely peopled by savages to 
become a populous nation of millions of 
civilized men. It took millenniums for 
the hope begotten in the heart of a 
prophet to ripen into reality in the in- 
carnation of Jesus. Why then wonder 
and lose heart because the spiritual con- 
quest of the world through gentleness, 
patience and love should progress so 
tardily. 

A second fact we would do well to 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 117 

ponder is that slow as the progress of 
the Kingdom must from its very nature 
be, it has been seriously retarded by the 
perfidy of the very organization to 
which Jesus committed its fortunes. 
That organization is known as the 
Church. As long as the Church ad- 
hered to and was inspired and con- 
trolled by the simple principles of its 
founder she made rapid progress. She 
outstripped in celerity the marches of 
an Alexander. Within a brief period 
she had planted the standard of the 
Cross in most of the important capitals 
of Europe and Asia Minor. By faith 
the followers of Jesus subdued king- 
doms, wrought righteousness, stopped 
the mouths of lions, quenched the vio- 
lence of fire. Even a Christian Em- 
peror occupied the throne of the 
Csgsars. Kome, that moral cesspool of 
the nations, began to feel the cleansing 
power of the Gospel ; her temples which 



118 THE WOELD WAE AND 

were brothels were turned into pure 
sanctuaries, her priests — the ministers 
of vice — became zealous preachers of 
righteousness. Gladiatorial shows and 
Eleusinian mysteries were supplanted 
by moral and spiritual services. Her 
women who had been slaves, and her 
slaves who had been ill-used cattle came 
to be regarded and treated as human 
beings. 

But by and by the Church designed 
to remain separate from the world be- 
came merged in the world. She became 
inoculated with the world's philosophy, 
became mixed in politics and infected 
by worldly ambition. Controversies 
arose which splintered her into frag- 
ments and weakened her influence. 
Her lust for political aggrandizement 
and power paralyzed her. Forgetting 
her mission which was to redeem men 
from sin, she made converts by force, 
and drove them to baptism by the power 



THE; EOAD TO PEACE 119 

of the sword. Tlie meek and lowly 
Jesus was no longer represented by a 
Paul who was aflame with a passion for 
souls; or a John who walked in inti- 
mate fellowship with his Master, or by 
a Barnabas the son of consolation; but 
by a Hildebrand or an Innocent — 
haug'hty, arrogant, tyrannical, cruel, 
lustful, before whose swaggering au- 
thority Kings must come on their 
knees. 

To be sure during all this period of 
degeneracy a remnant was preserved 
who kept the pure fires of devotion 
alive in caves and dens of the earth, 
in catacombs and in secret places. 
ISTow and then a saintly hero like 
Savonarola would arise to denounce the 
corruption of the times and defy the 
Vatican with its wriggling minions. 
Reformations too and revivals occurred 
at intervals in the history of the Church 
which in a measure cleansed the clogged 



120 THE WOELD WAR AIH) 

channel through which the pure water 
of life was meant to flow for the healing 
of the nations. And yet the most lojal 
Churchman of us must acknowledge 
that there is still a good bit of the road 
of repentance to travel before the 
Church gets back to the simple charter 
which alone justifies her existence. 

Meanwhile deploring as we must this 
shameful record of the Church and see- 
ing as we do how her aberrations have 
seriously hindered a more rapid realiza- 
tion of the program of Jesus we will 
not fail to remember that these grave 
and disgraceful departures of the 
Church from the faith once for all de- 
livered to the saints are not chargeable 
to Christianity. The perversions, dis- 
tortions, and corruptions which dis- 
figure the history of the Church; the 
clericalism, priestism, sacerdotalism, 
and tawdry symbolisms which have 
crept into the life of the church are 



THE BOAD TO PEACE 121 

no more an essential feature of 
Christianity than barnacles are an es- 
sential feature of the structure of a 
ship, or than leprosy is an essential 
feature of the human form divine. 
.The purity of the spring is not dis- 
credited because the stream which flows 
from it is fouled miles away from its 
source. 'Nor are the purity, vitality and 
power of Christianity discredited by the 
ghastly caricatures of it which the cor- 
rupted church has from time to time 
presented to the world. 

Still another thing we have to bear 
in mind as we wonder and ponder over 
the delay of the Kingdom of peace is 
that while the church has gotten rid 
of many of the abuses which have in- 
capacitated her as an instrument of the 
power of Jesus she has yet in large 
measure to learn to mind her own 
business and to attend to the one thing 
which has been given her to do. Jesus 



122 THE WOELD WAE AND 

said : " As the Father hath sent me 
into the world, so send I you into the 
world." He has left ns in no doubt as 
to his purpose in coming into the world 
— a purpose which he never lost sight 
of, and from which he was not to be 
diverted. He came to save sinners; to 
seek and to save the lost; to give re- 
pentance to men and the remission of 
their sins. Men were slaves and he 
came to set them free. They were 
spiritually dead and he came to give 
them life. They were blind and he 
came to open their eyes. They were 
selfish, wilful, unrighteous, cruel, and 
he came to restore them to moral 
sanity. They were lost sheep and he 
came to bring them in out of the wild 
pasture and out of the stormy night. 

This was his mission and this is the 
mission of the Church. IsTever was the 
Church numerically stronger than she 
is today, ^ever was she so active and 



THE EOAD TO PEACE 123 

busy as at present. ^Never were so 
many well-disposed people engaged in 
works of philanthropy and benevolence 
as now. !N^ever were men more intent 
on the business of softening hard con- 
ditions, relieving distress, feeding the 
hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the 
sick than today. But if we are to ac- 
cept the ]N"ew Testament definition of 
the Church all this that her adherents 
are so largely devoting themselves to 
must be regarded as but an incidental 
feature of her great commission, just 
as healing the sick in body, opening 
blind eyes, cleansing lepers, feeding the 
hungry multitude were incidental 
features of Jesus' mission. He did 
not come to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a 
philanthropist, or a dispenser of alms. 
He came to make bad men good, un- 
righteous men righteous, heartless men 
merciful, impure men pure, wandering 
prodigals sons of God. The Church 



124 THE WORLD WAR AND 

does well to build hospitals and alms 
houses, to fill storehouses for the sup- 
ply of the needy, to devise better 
methods for the care of men's bodies 
and the education of their minds; but 
the church was called and commissioned 
to preach the Gospel which is the power 
of God unto salvation, the power of God 
to turn men from wickedness, from self- 
ishness, from pride, from the lusts of 
the flesh. The Church is an am- 
bassador with instruction, a messenger 
with a message which she has been ap- 
pointed to deliver to all men — the 
message of forgiveness, of love, of good 
will and peace. Teed men and they 
will be hungry again ; gratify them and 
they will be ungrateful again; house 
them and they will be improvident 
again ; make concession after concession 
and they will demand the more. The 
Gospel which Jesus put into our hands 
was not the Gospel of improvement 



THE ROAD TO PEACE 125 

merely, the Gospel of social betterment, 
the Gospel of soap and sand paper, a 
sort of remedial measure for the cure 
of u.ncouthness, a sort of drapery where- 
with to disguise men's natural feroci- 
ties. This might have been his Gospel 
if his conception of sin had been that 
of many of us — a fall up, an in- 
teresting phase of moral evolution; a 
misfortune at the very worst; the 
stumbling of a blind man; the in- 
firmity of a defective man. But look- 
ing upon sin as the most awful fact in 
the universe; as separation from God; 
as alienation from the highest and the 
holiest; as denial and defiance of all 
moral restraints ; as that thing which if 
uncontrolled would dethrone God; the 
remedy Jesus proposed and which He 
commanded the church to proclaim 
must match the disease — the Gospel 
of Moral and Spiritual regeneration. 
Give men this Gospel and then the 



126 THE EOAD TO PEACE 

rich will be humble and the poor 
will be content; the ferocious will be 
tamed and the meek will come into 
their own ; the great and the strong will 
kneel by the side of the ministering 
Christ in service and the weak will 
bless and not curse. The frontiers of 
the nations will be defined bj walls of 
salvation and gates of praise. The art 
of war shall be forgotten; and the wolf 
shall dwell with the lamb, and the 
leopard shall lie down with the kid, and 
the calf and the young lion and the 
f attling together ; and a little child shall 
lead them. 



FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEIOA 



'T'HE following pages contain advertisements 
of a few of the Macmillan books on kindred 
subjects. 



Through War to Peace 

By albert G. KELLER 

Professor of the Science of Society in Yale 

University, and Author of " Societal 

Evolution." 

Cloth, i2mo. 

Professor Keller discusses the present war 
from the point of view of the sociological, or 
the societal, theory. This theory, briefly, is 
that society expands by developing certain cus- 
toms, manners or folk-ways. Gradually these 
customs become a religion, ultimately develop- 
ing into what may be called a code. There has 
been growing up an international code of re- 
cent years and the progress of civilization is 
determined by the character and efficiency of 
this code. The Germans marked a variation 
from this code and notably during the last few 
years have been developing a code of their 
own, sharply opposed to that of civilization. 
The present war is then regarded as an in- 
evitable conflict between the code of civiliza- 
tion and the German variant. Professor Kel- 
ler writes in a vigorous and popular style, pre- 
senting his theoretical and rationalistic sup- 
port of the American cause in a way that the 
average reader can understand and appreciate. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64^66 Fifth Avenue New York 



TWO BOOKS BY WALTER E. WEYL 

The American 
World Policies 

i^** $2.25 e. 

The United States is deeply concerned with 
the peace which is to be made in Europe, and 
with the Great Society to be re-constituted 
after the war. With world influence come 
new responsibilities, opportunities and dan- 
gers. This book relates our foreign policy to 
our internal problems, to the clash of indus- 
trial classes and of political parties, to the de- 
cay of sectionalism and the slow growth of a 
national sense. It is a study of " American- 
ism " from without and within. 

The End of the War 

Preparing 

Here Dr. Wejd gives us a new interpreta- 
tion of the war and of America's entrance into 
it. He points out the end toward which the 
war is moving and outlines an American policy 
for the war and for the peace which is to fol- 
low it. His purpose is to show the relation 
of this struggle to the whole history of Amer- 
ican thought and action, and to forecast the 
future policy of this country toward Europe 
and the world. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



The Soul of Democracy 

By EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS 

Cloth, i2mo. $1.25 

What at bottom does the war mean? Why- 
has it been our war from the beginning? 
What will be the effect of the war upon our 
social philosophy and upon the future of 
democracy? These are the questions which 
this volume undertakes to answer. The re- 
spective values of democracy and paternalism 
for efficiency, endurance and finally for the 
welfare and progress of humanity are studied 
in a series of vital chapters culminating in an 
analysis of the effect of the war upon social- 
ism, feminism, religion, education and litera- 
ture. Those who have heard the author's pub- 
lic addresses will readily realize the signifi- 
cance of a volume embodying his whole philos- 
ophy of the world's struggle with its effect 
upon the future. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



America Among the Nations 

By H. H. powers 

Author of "The Things Men Fight For," etc. 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.50 

To arrive at an estimate of national char- 
acter from the homely facts of our national 
history, is the purpose of this volume, as ex- 
pressed by the author. He would, too, dis- 
card the time-honored prepossessions and epi- 
thets which have too long done duty with us as 
estimates of foreign nations, and arrive at a 
juster conclusion based on their actions. In 
short, he says, this book is an attempt at an 
historic interpretation of our national char- 
acter and of our relation to other nations. 
With this purpose in mind he devotes the first 
part of his text to a consideration of America 
at home, taking up such topics as. The First 
Americans ; The Logic of Isolation ; The Great 
Expansion; The Break with Tradition; The 
Aftermath of Panama; Pan- Americanism and 
the Dependence of the Tropics. The second 
division is entitled America Among the World 
Powers, and considers among other things: 
The Greater Powers ; The Mongolian Menace ; 
Greater Japan; Germany, The Storm Center; 
The Greatest Empire; and The Greatest Fel- 
lowship. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64r-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



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